


viva americana

by heavyliesthecrown



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Discussion of Grief/Death, F/M, Future Fic, Grief/Death related themes, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Death (not in the main pairing), Mild Language, seriously very heavy angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-06-23 23:16:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 61,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15617175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavyliesthecrown/pseuds/heavyliesthecrown
Summary: She’d seen him last when they’d still been happy. She’d heard from him last, ten years ago, when they weren’t anymore. She didn’t hold it against him – the break in the chain of first love was inevitable. That’s just how the story goes.So she’d thought.Or, in the dead of night, she gets a call that her best friend is teetering on the edge of death. Maybe she should’ve expected it, maybe she should’ve been prepared for it – but she hadn’t been the only one to get that call.





	1. Thursday, Night

_Listen to the wind blow, down comes the night._

 

**_12:27 a.m._ **

**Thursday – Day 1**

It comes twenty-seven minutes after midnight.

It comes after she tucks herself in bed for the night with a book she hasn’t really been reading spread open on her lap.

The sound comes first. Then, the vibration against the solid oak of her nightstand.

Then, the name.

It flashes across her screen, bright and accosting against her dim lamp, and when it does, she thinks seriously about sending it straight to voicemail.

Or better yet, she thinks about just chucking her phone straight out the window, because rarely is there an instance where a phone call at this particular hour is a good thing.

But after seven rings, she answers the call. She’s counted out each ring one by horrible one to buy as much time as possible, but at seven she knows that it’s now or never. There isn’t any need for her to answer because she knows exactly what comes next, but answering her phone is the polite thing to do. It’s the nice thing to do in the face of the stomach-twisting unpleasantness that she’s sure is about to follow.

“Hi, Mr. Andrews,” Betty whispers.

When she speaks, her voice doesn’t sound like her own.

 

**_12:28 a.m._ **

In the interest of time, she scans her room and checks off the things she should throw in her bag while Archie’s dad talks.

Her hairbrush.

An extra set of clothes.

The framed picture on her dresser of her and Archie at their high school graduation. It’ll be unwieldy in her bag, but she wants to be able to show it to him as proof of how much he still means to her.

But halfway through the rundown, she realizes that she hasn’t caught half of what Fred Andrews has told her so far.

It was late.

_It figures as much given the hour._

It was dark.

_That goes hand in hand with the fact that it was late._

He’d been listening to music when it’d happened.

 _Of course he had been because it’s Archie – always at least one earbud in, feet tapping to the rhythm, Archie._  

It’d been raining and he hadn’t seen the car. 

_The rain is only fitting for a moment like this._

_Archie doesn’t like the rain, and that’s been true since their childhood. She_ _’_ _d always found the rain soothing; it has a steadiness and a rhythm to it when it drums on the sidewalk, on the roof, on her windowpane that calms her. That kind of orderliness has never failed to soother her._

_And, there’s the abundance of it all. Water is so vital, so necessary, and to have it pour unprompted from the sky like that had always felt like something of a gift._

_Archie never felt the same. He’d never admit it even to this day, but she thinks it’s because the rain scared him. The rumble of thunder, the way it barricaded him away from the outside and into the confines of his own house, the way it snuffed out the sunlight – none of that ever sat right with Archie._

_Archie hates the rain._

Mary Andrews is en-route from Chicago. Fred Andrews himself is driving down from Riverdale, but maybe she wants to get there, too, and soon in case they have to say their goodbyes.

_She’ll get there, but not to say her goodbyes. Not that._

_Never that._

_What bullshit._

_She’s not saying any goodbyes, least of all to Archie._  

He’s at New York Presbyterian. He’d gone almost immediately into surgery. 

_But he’s alive._

For now.

 _He’s still alive._  

 

**_12:32 a.m._ **

In a desperate, messy scramble to untangle herself from her blankets once the line rings dead, she ends up landing face flat on the ground with palms fanned out against the floorboards.

The cracks in the panels dig painfully into her palms as she breaks her fall and her forehead just barely misses the corner of her dresser.

She doesn’t rise immediately. She doesn’t want to. 

 _I could just stay here,_ she thinks. _I could roll under the bed, join the dust, and just stay right here forever._

_It’s quiet here._

_It’s safe here._

_But_ , she battles with herself, if it were her lying a four-hour drive away, Archie would’ve already been on his way to her. He’d be in the car breaking speed limits by now. If it were her broken and battered half a country away, then he’d be on a plane. He’d be doing worlds more for her in the time that she’s wasting now feeling scared and so very sorry for herself.

So, she gives herself ten seconds to pull herself together. 

 _One._  

How the hell is she going to get to New York in the dead of night?

_Four._

Didn’t her license expire? She remembers telling herself to renew it. 

_Seven._

No, she’d set that reminder six months early, she remembers now. She hates the DMV and that’s the amount of time that it’ll take her to muster up the courage, bite the bullet, and go and get it over with.

_Nine._

Why Archie?

Why him of all people? Why now? Why this?

_Ten._

She rises to her feet and starts packing.

 

**_1:02 a.m._ **

Unexpired license notwithstanding, her first thought is still to take an Uber from Providence to New York. She doesn’t have a car; up until now there’s never been the need for her to own one. But after she’s called for three separate drivers and subsequently been cancelled on and laughed off three times because no one is interested in escorting her to another state at this hour, she seriously reconsiders the need for a car in her life.

 _But it’s neither the time or place to lament on that_ , she reminds herself. There will be time for that later, time for all the research she’ll need to do into buying a used car.

Used because her father has always been right, at least when it comes to cars – _if you buy a new car, Betty_ , he’d told her as he waggled a crescent wrench at her, _that sucker will depreciate by at least fifty percent in value over the next five years._

She’d been eight, maybe nine at the time and sitting on a cardboard box that would later collapse under her thirteen-year-old self; the very same cardboard box that would kick off her sugar-and-carbohydrate embargo, imposed by her mother on her.

She had no idea what _depreciation_ even meant at that age, but even back then she’d know it was nothing good given the way her father turned up his rounded nose at Ricky and Vicky Mantle cruising down Elm Street in a white convertible they’d bought at some dealership down in Rye. 

 _‘Look at that, Betty,’_ he’d scoffed, and even though she’d been tucked away under the car, flat on her back on the Cooper Creeper – her father’s affectionate name for it, not hers – she’d known he’d been shaking his head at the Mantles _. ‘Don’t ever be that supremely stupid.’_

 _‘Well,’_ she’d joked, scooting out, kicking her legs out in an effort to find her grip on the floor. _‘What did you expect from a couple named Ricky and Vicky?’_

Why the hell is she thinking about this now?

She’s wasted so much time as it is arguing and bargaining with Uber drivers.

She doesn’t have any more of it to spare – she’d been fresh out even before the phone call and she hadn’t even known it.

She orders her fourth car and instructs it to take her to the airport. She doesn’t know if this is universal of all airports or only of the one she’s been to in recent memory – Charlotte, maybe D.C., she can’t remember right now – but there’d been a twenty-four hour Hertz there.

And she remembers on the journey over, a fact she’d completely forgotten until her driver asks her what terminal to drop her at, there are planes at airports, too.

 

 ** _1:55 a.m._**                

She figures that if there’s a plane leaving for New York in the next half-hour, it’ll get her there faster than driving will so she makes a play for the red-eyes first.

She’s also dropped right off at departures because her words gargle whenever she tries to speak, and she can’t tell her driver to drop her off anywhere else but smack-dab in front of American Airlines.

 _‘Hertz,’_ she’d tried to say, repeatedly. _‘I need to go to Hertz.’_

But even to her, it’d just sounded like she’d been blubbering out the word _hurts_ over and over, again and again.

It works as anything else though, because right now everything hurts. The thought of Archie, her sweet, happy-go-lucky Archie lying in pain and twisted out of shape on a rickety hospital bed on wheels hurts. There are times, too many times maybe, that when she thinks of Archie, she still thinks of him as that slightly chubby, freckled-face kid, dressed in plain tees tucked into his shorts. Thinking of that person losing life by the second now just plain hurts.

The stark realization that until the phone call, it’d been more than a beat since she'd sent so much as a thought Archie’s way also hurts. 

It hurts her head. It hurts her heart. It hurts her _goddamned toes._

But it’s the thought of living in a world without Archie that hurts her most of all, so tangibly and so savagely that it has her rubbing idly at her chest, pilling together thin strands of fabric in clumps without realizing it. That thought hurts more than anything has hurt her in a while.

Which makes her think that she should’ve seen this coming. 

It ebbs and flows, life – it pushes and pulls the way the moon directs the oceans tides, its waves and crescents, its peaks and troughs. She’s been doing okay recently, she’s been happy.

So in hindsight, she should’ve seen the downfall coming.

She just never would’ve predicted that the downfall would come onto Archie Andrews and not her. 

 _There’s so much more for him to do_ , she finds herself thinking. _He’s too young to die_.

_We’re all too young to die._

 

**_1:59 a.m._ **

She cuts the line. 

There aren’t that many people there to begin with, but there are enough. They all wear their weariness plainly in their very beings – in the way their bodies sag and slump over their carry-ons, in their half-hooded and heavy eyelids.

She doesn’t even feel sorry for jumping the line. If they only knew.

“New York,” Betty demands, spinning her tote over her shoulder and slapping it down onto the counter. “I need to get to New York. Now.”

“Ma’am, the line starts back-”

“I’ll pay for it,” she interrupts, dumping out the contents of her wallet and flicking over the few credit cards and cash she has with her to the attendant. Her spare change rattles nosily as it spins out in every direction. “I can pay for it, I have the-”

“Ma’am, that’s really not the issue here.”

“He might be dying,” she snaps, slapping her palm down on the counter top. The seething malice in her own voice surprises her; there’d been few occasions for her to use it in her life recently. “He could be dying _right now_ , and the longer I spend here talking to you are seconds and minutes I’m not spending with him. So you’re going to get on your computer and-” 

She opens her mouth wide then, sucking in air, knowing full well that she’s bearing an uncanny resemblance to a woman on the verge. She’s aware of just how dangerous a show she’s putting on because Alice Cooper has singlehandedly gotten her entire family booted off a flight to Florida once for causing a very similar scene at check-in – over leg room in economy class no less – and Betty knows she’s going to be left with nothing but hitchhiking if any security guards come by and escort her out of the airport now.

“Ma’am,” the attendant begins again. “I understand the urgency. The next flight to New York leaves in the morning.”

She stands there, chest heaving and breathless. She’s peacocking, she realizes as she stares at her hands spread wide across the pathetic ledge of a counter top.

But it isn’t working. 

“Fine,” Betty concedes, even though she has half a mind to demand that they charter her a plane to New York right now. She doesn’t recognize her tone – it’s so cold, so spiteful, so unfamiliar and unused. 

“Take the shuttle to the car rental center,” she’s told. 

And, there’s a Dunkin Donuts there, too, open twenty-four hours. 

Betty understands exactly why she’s told that because she’s always been good at reading between the lines.   

_Get coffee, and maybe some food if you can stomach it._

It’s going to be a long night.

 

**_2:22 a.m._ **

They stick her with a truck.

She battles it fiercely, making up some excuse about how she’s never driven anything that size before while flailing both a hot and an iced coffee in either hand.

Two coffees because she’s already exhausted at mile zero and she has about two hundred and twenty more to go.

But even in the face of all her coffee-waving, she’s told to _‘take it or leave it, honey.’_

So, she takes it, and without throwing coffee at the man's face like she really wants to.

Betty highly doubts that the truck they’d assigned to her had really been the ‘ _only car available,’_ since she walks past what she thinks are hundreds of modest sedans, but she’s in no position to bargain right now. And when she sees it, monstrous and looming in front of her, she tells herself repeatedly that switching cars now will only waste more time she doesn’t have.

 _What a joke, though_ , she thinks. 

A yellow car. 

A _yellow_ _truck_. 

Bright like the sun, yellow like happiness and warmth and all the good in the world – what a depraved, sick, and twisted joke.

 

**_3:15 a.m._ **

She comes up with a game to play with herself because her two coffees do little by way of combating the monotony and darkness of the open road. 

The memories she has of Archie – the good, the bad. The sad. Her job now is to remember them all – in every little detail imaginable, every little, important word.

 _Remember it all,_ she repeats to herself over and over again – _so you can hold onto it._

 _The funniest memory she has of Archie_.

That’s an easy one – eighth grade health class and the time he’d made a banana explode over his desk, courtesy of his crippling embarrassment at being the poor, unlucky soul called upon to demonstrate condom protocol and the joys of safe sex. 

She’d laughed for days after.

_The saddest memory she has of Archie._

There aren’t too many to pick from. That’s the wonderful thing about Archie – nearly every memory she has of him is filled with so much warmth.

He’s filled her life with so much happiness.

But if she has to pick, gun to her head, the saddest memory she has of Archie is the day she’d left for college. He’d insisted on saying goodbye and seeing her off right at the car’s door.

“It’s my dad’s truck,” he’d argued back, tossing her last suitcase into the truck’s flat bed. “I should get to come to the airport too.”

“No, Arch,” she’d told him seriously. “You have to stay here. _Please_ stay here. I won’t get on the plane if you don’t.” 

It’s one of the saddest memories she has in her arsenal because it’d hit her right then and there that this was the end. Not the end of their friendship, because that was never-ending, unbreakable and titanic in size. But it’d been the end of the way they were, the end of their childhood, the end of him living next door to her, of her living right next door to him.

From there on out, she’d live in different cities and different houses, different rooms and apartments. 

But never again next to him like this. 

Standing halfway between his house and hers, she’d cried into her best friend’s shoulder and wiped her snot on his plain yellow t-shirt – bright like the sun, bright like the smile he’d tried his best to plaster across his face as he encouraged her back into the truck. 

Before she’d pulled the door shut, she’d sent him straight back to his house because she hadn’t wanted to watch him fade from her view as her parents drove her away to a new life that while undoubtedly exciting, led her away from the people she loved more than anything.

But he had still watched her drive away from his living room window.

That memory doesn’t surpass this moment now, though. This unknowing, this vortex of spinning emptiness and nervousness swirling in her stomach is now, bar none, the saddest memory she has of Archie.

_The happiest memory she has of Archie._

It’s a hard one because Archie is always happy.

She thinks that the memory of Archie that had made _her_ happiest is the first night she’d ever slept in his bed, to others, a night completely forgettable and so much like every other night in Riverdale. But to her, a night that had nearly turned her twelve-year-old world upside down.

All because of a single word. 

 _Divorce_ , she’d heard her parents throw around downstairs in the living room when they thought she and Polly had been sleeping. To this day, she still doesn’t know if Polly had actually been, but _she’d_ been crouched down behind the banister, hands gripping on tightly to the balusters as they’d volleyed the threat back and forth to each other. 

_Divorce, divorce._

After she’d heard the ugly word, she’d crawled back up to her room, to her bed that failed to provide the comfort and security it had in the moments before she’d camped out on the stairs. 

She hadn’t been able to sleep.

She couldn’t sleep there, not with all that animosity and hate filling her house.

So, she’d gone next door.

“Arch,” she’d whispered, poking him awake. _“Archie.”_

“Oh my god, Betty! What are you doing here?” he’d hissed, startling awake and kicking out at the blankets tangled around his legs.

“I climbed through Vegas’ dog door.” She’d been small for her age at twelve. “My parents were just talking about divorce. I’m scared, Arch.”

“Wha’,” he’d said, voice heavily laced with sleep. “Who’s getting divorced?”

“My parents,” she’d repeated again. “Maybe. What if they do?”

“Oh,” Archie had said, scooting over on his bed to make room for her. “Betty, there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s their choice.”

“I don’t want my mom to move away,” she’d whispered, drawing her blanket tightly around herself. _Like a cape,_ she’d thought, but it hadn’t made her feel any more heroic or brave.

“I don’t want my dad to move, either. I don’t want to leave Riverdale. I like it here. I like our window and I like my room.”

“Okay,” Archie had started slowly. “You don’t even know if they’re getting divorced yet. I’m not going lie to you, Betty. It’s not super fun when your parents are divorced. But you know, they fight less.”

She’d sighed out and tipped her head against the wall.

“Do you want to stay here?” Archie had asked. “I don’t mind.” 

She’d nodded into the dark. “Yes, please,” she’d added, in case he couldn’t see her.

“I’ll sleep the other way.”

“No need,” she’d said. “I don’t care. We can sleep the same way.”

He’d told her that it’d be okay more than once, and that even if she did end up moving, they’d still stay friends. Best friends. Nothing would change that.

Then, he’d held her hand the entire night, never loosening his grip once.

She remembers how livid her mother had been when she’d found out exactly where her youngest daughter had been. At the time, she hadn’t understood why something as innocent as her just sleeping over at Archie’s house had invoked the wrath of Alice Cooper. Archie was just Archie –  her best friend, her confidant. Just Archie. Why should it be so overwhelmingly strange that she’d have sleepovers with him when she was allowed to have them with Ethel and all the other girls in her class? Girls she didn’t care about nearly as much as she did Archie?

 _‘Because it’s improper,’_ she’d been told.

She hadn’t cared one whit about the impropriety of it all, even when her mother sat her down on the armchair with the bottoms of her shoes just barely brushing the ground and drilled into her over and over again that _‘nice girls didn’t go sneaking into boys’ beds in the middle of the night, Elizabeth.’_  

Who gave a shit about things like that? About being _nice._

She certainly didn’t.

The Coopers remained the united Coopers, but she often wonders if her parents should’ve divorced. Maybe they both might’ve found a better love than the one they’d found with each other – she knows they’re not happy together. They tolerate each other, and they tolerate their shared life. 

But they’re not happy.

And life, she’s realizing now, is far too short to spend unhappy. 

 _It’s not about them right now,_ she tells herself when she feels her mind wandering. _Archie. It’s about Archie._  

The happiest she thinks she’s ever seen Archie himself look is the day he’d asked Veronica to prom through some horribly cheesy, ill-rhymed song so incredibly terrible she’d wondered if Veronica would really say no on those grounds alone.

But Veronica hadn’t because back then, she’d loved him. When she’d said yes, he’d smiled so widely and so brightly she’d thought that he’d end up breaking his own face.

Betty wonders what Veronica is up to now.

She hasn’t thought about her in years.

 

**_3:43 a.m._ **

_Her very favorite memory she has of Archie._

That’s the easiest one of all. She supposes she’s cheating just a little, because her favorite memory of Archie isn’t just one that she shares with him, but with someone else, too.

Him.

Jughead.

She has several versions of this memory because such is the wonderful repetitiveness of childhood. It’s something they’d done hundreds, maybe even thousands of times – spend a lazy, idle day washing off the summer’s heat down at Sweetwater River.

But this day and this particular incarnation of the memory is her favorite of them all.

They’d been ten.

The sun, she remembers, had hung directly above them; the heat had hit her right on the crown on her head. She hadn’t wanted to swim at that moment because her ear had waterlogged earlier that day during a round of hold-your-breath-the-longest. But as much as she'd tipped her head to the side and smacked against her opposite ear, nothing had done the trick.

In the face of jibes of _‘sore-loser’_ and _‘big-baby’_ because she’d lost the game by miles, she’d sat herself down by the banks of the river and pulled up daisies by the handful, weaving them together in chains just like Polly had taught her years ago, when her fingers had still carried with them their chubby baby pudge.

She’d just been finishing her third and final chain when they’d emerged from the water, black and red hair dripping twin lines of water across the grass as they made their way to her.

Her memory dates back to before she’d become self-conscious about sitting around in a bathing suit in front of them – that would come about three years later. It’d come long before the days she and Jughead would sneak off to Sweetwater River alone and without Archie, hearts racing at the newness of their hands, their mouths on each other.

 _Young love_ , she thinks then. _Young, stupid love._

She’d been so in love with him back then.

“Are you done pouting?” Jughead had asked, earning him a wet slap on the arm from Archie.

“I’m _not_ done pouting because I wasn’t pouting in the first-”

“Betty, what is that?” Archie had interrupted quickly. Always the go-between, always the peacemaker – the solid link that held them all together.

“They’re daisy chains,” she’d explained, her voice turning bright as she held out twin rings that matched the one she’d tied around her own wrist. “They’re friendship bracelets. Put them on!” 

“They’re flowers,” Jughead had said to her.

“So?” she’d asked, both fisted hands digging hard into her hips as she stood her ground. She’d wanted to throw back some retort about horses and gifts that she’d overheard her mother saying sternly on the phone, but for the life of her, she couldn’t remember how it went.

_A horse is a very valuable gift?_

_Don’t put a gift into a horse’s mouth?_  

“Come on, Jug,” Archie had said, coming to her defense as he twisted his wrist in careful and wide-eyed examination of the daises. “They’re cool.”

He’d rolled his eyes as he reluctantly stuck out his wrist.

Archie’s voice had still been so high back then, almost even higher than hers. “They’re friendship bracelets?” he’d asked. 

“Yup.”

“So that means we’ll be friends forever, right? Isn’t that how these work?”

“They’re flowers, Archie, they don’t mean any-”

“They’re _friendship bracelets_ , so yes,” she’d cut in, throwing over her best side eye over to the friend she’d wanted to flick on the forehead in that moment. “That’s how it works. We’ll be friends forever.”

“Promise?” 

She’d looked to Jughead before answering, but even then, he’d already been the master of impassiveness, aloof to the end and at least in that stage of her life, hard to read. “Promise,” she’d repeated back, setting her hand on top of Archie’s.

Then, they’d both turned to him in wait.

“Jughead, don’t be an-”

“I promise,” he’d relented, reaching into the circle and covering her hand with his.

 When they’d broken, her daisy chain had caught onto his.

The daisies had fluttered to the ground, one by one, some in straight spirals downward and others catching with the wind – a mix of both their flowers coming apart at the seams. 

“Sorry,” he’d said sheepishly as he’d looked to his feet. “I didn’t mean to.” 

“It’s okay, Juggie,” she’d said, making sure she’d smiled toothily at him so that he’d know it really was okay. For her, calling him _‘Jug’_ would come later, when they were older, when she loved him differently and as more than a friend. “It’s not a big deal. It’s just a daisy chain.” 

Even back then, she knows she’d meant so much more by that. A daisy chain may be fragile and it may be malleable, but friendship isn’t. The bonds of friendship – they’re so much stronger than that.

They were so young.

They still _are_ so young – far, far too young to die.

But, she’s old enough to know now that the chain can break. Friendship can endure and weather through so much. It can survive tumult, but it isn’t indestructible. It can be finite. It is breakable.

She should know. She, Jughead, their stupidity, their immaturity – they’d been the ones to break it.

She thinks about him a lot. Maybe – _probably_ – more than she really should for someone who left her life so long ago.

She wonders if Fred Andrews called him about Archie. 

She hopes he has a good life. She hopes that it’s even better than good.

She wonders where he is now.

 

**_4:23 a.m._ **

When it starts raining, she rolls down all four windows. She’d loved the rain before, right up until Fred Andrews had so flatly informed her that the rain she once thought was so vital to every part of life and being might in fact be the catalyst to Archie losing his. 

She hates it now.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wonders if this is the very same rain that Archie had been running through hours before; this heavy, very blameworthy rain that’s pelting and soaking her left side of her now. 

Betty screams at it just in case it is.

She turns her head, just enough so that one eye remains fixed still on the dark road in front of her, and she screams out the window as loudly as she can.

It’s high pitched at first, more like a shriek than anything else. It’s one of the highest notes her voice can reach and it’s a truly ugly, haunting noise. It’s painful in sound, painful in feeling, and when she starts tasting the tang of bile at the back of her throat, it starts to become brutally wonderful. 

The pain, the feeling. 

Then, it’s a hoarse, guttural scream, emanating low in her stomach and shaking through every part of her. 

She screams until she’s out of air and lightheaded. She screams until she’s dangerously dizzy.

Then, she screams again.

 

**_4:34 a.m._ **

She’s pulled over near Riverdale.

Her first instinct is to add an extra ten miles an hour and book it like nobody’s business. Stopping will only waste more time that she already doesn’t have, time that she’s already out of.

But, a move like that is more likely to end with her in the slammer instead of her at Archie’s bedside and keeping vigil where she’d rather be, so she guides the car over to the shoulder of the road and flicks off the ignition.

She’s doesn’t realize she’s freezing until she tries to speak. Her teeth chatter and tap together when she pulls her mouth open.  

“Ma’am,” the officer starts. She hates being called ma’am. And, she’s been subjected to it twice already tonight. It makes her feel old. “Are you aware you were going eighty in a fifty-five?”

“Yes,” she starts slowly. “I mean, no. I’m aware now, but I wasn’t then.” _Lies._ “I’m very, very sorry.” _More lies._

“And are you aware your windows are down?”

“I needed fresh air,” she responds dumbly. She’s sure he doesn’t believe her because she barely believes herself.

“Well, you might want to roll them up,” he suggests, tugging along the perforation and handing her the rain-dotted slip. “The entire back seat is soaked.” 

“Oh,” she says, fumbling at her side for the window controls. “Right. Thank you.” 

Fifty-five from now on, she’s told, and not a hair over that. And a ticket to remind her, too, in case she forgets. 

Betty listens because she always does. 

But the sun starts to peek over the choppy, uneven line of the horizon in front of her, gently lighting the road ahead, and when it does, it strikes a sharp splinter of fear right into her heart.

It’s morning now. 

It’s officially a brand new day and she’s still not there yet.

She swallows hard and steps down harder on the gas.

She speeds up.

 

 ** _6:19 a.m._**  

There’s an underground parking lot at the hospital that initially, she’s overwhelmingly thankful for because she doesn’t have the time of day right now to find street parking.

But only initially, because after four rounds circling the lot, she isn’t able to find anything that isn’t a spot that requires her to parallel park. 

She doesn’t know how to. And she’s never been in a situation where she’s really had to before – there’s always been someone next to her who’s known how.

She’s frustrated as she sits in wait by the sliding doors to the hospital, frustrated because she’s always meant to learn. Frustrated because once again, she’s wasting valuable time.

 _“Hey!”_ Betty barks out at a family of four as they emerge from behind the hospital’s automatic doors, huddled together with their heads bowed. They jump together, collectively balking at her and her messy, unkempt head sticking out the truck’s window. “Are you leaving?”

She holds up her hands in the _‘well, are you’_ gesture when they continue to stare at her, unresponsive. She can feel the way her eyes are bugging out of her head.

 _Morons_ , she thinks. They’re here, too, so it’s not like they don’t understand the extreme urgency of it all. 

_Idiots._

“Yes,” the matriarch says eventually. 

She follows them, maybe a little too closely on their heels, and almost clips their car as she pulls into their spot.

 

**_6:31 a.m._ **

She realizes that in her failure to actually listen to what Fred Andrews had said while she’d very uselessly been panicking and visually packing, she has no idea what floor, let alone room that Archie is actually in.

She barely knows if she’s at the right hospital.

“Andrews,” she says, leaning over the front desk. “I’m looking for Archie Andrews. I mean Archibald. Archibald Andrews.”

He’d be furious with her for even uttering his name, she thinks. He loves it because it’d been his grandfather’s name and Archie is sweet like that. Sentimental. But he hates it, too. 

"You don’t have to love it just because it’s your grandfather’s name," she remembers Jughead saying to them once. "Mine is too, and I just hate it."

"My name’s mine," she’d interjected then, and with just a tinge of smugness, too, a tinge of conceit. She’d been young – _they’d_ been young – and that had always come with the inextricable need for her to measure up to them and earn her rightful place in the friend group. "I’m the first Elizabeth in my family."

"Yeah, but you’re also one of three Elizabeths in homeroom," he’d said to her frowning face. "That’s not _that_ special, Betty." 

She’d stuck her tongue out at him, but he’d been right – that’s why she’d gone by Betty in the first place.

He’d always been good at grounding her.

“Ma’am, I’m not seeing an Archi-” 

“He was in surgery,” Betty recounts, hand fluttering wildly with the information. She’s always been a gesturer when she talks, and more so when she’s nervous. Right now, she’s deathly so. “He was in a car accident. He was hit by a – by a car. Maybe he still is in surgery, I don’t know.”

It’s the first time she’s voiced it out loud in the past six hours and it comes out a whisper, like she’s afraid of the words themselves.

And in a way, she is.

“Try the seventh floor,” she’s told. So much direction, so much misdirection. _Everyone is inept at their jobs._ “That’s ICU.”

She doesn’t even mutter a thank you because she doesn’t think that hadn’t been very much information to be thankful for at all.

****

**_6:35 a.m._**  

“Archie Andrews,” she tries again on seven, pushing open the elevator door before it has a chance to do so itself. In her hurry, her right shoe flies off as it catches in the crack between the elevator and solid ground, spinning and skidding into the nurse’s station before she comes barreling into it moments after. “Or Archibald. He has red hair – really, really red, Scottish red – he was in a car accident and-”

“Ma’am-” 

 _“I don’t like being called ma’am,”_ she snaps back, hopping on one foot as she slides the back of her shoe over her heel.

Betty sighs, leaning against the counter as she presses the heels of her hands firmly into her eyes. She can just _feel_ how messy her hair is right now, there's no need to even look. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m just worried.”

It’s the understatement of her life because she’s never been more worried.

“Room 2037,” the nurse tells her, and she lets out a sound she’s never heard from herself before at the information, something between a sigh and a wail. “Down that hall, it’s the third room on the right.”

Betty starts running again, twisting and weaving around the nurses and scattered wheelchairs, ignoring the directives of _‘there’s no running in here, please slow down’_ because she’s an adult, this is an emergency, and this isn’t the playground, for god’s sake.

This is a place where every single moment matters, where life and death quite literally happen every single day. This is the place she’d sped through the night to and gotten her very first ticket for, so she’ll run if she damn well pleases. 

But at the door, she stops, hand frozen over the cold handle.

 

**_6:36 a.m._ **

Later, when she’s at war with herself and analyzing every moment and every wasted second far too carefully, she’ll tell herself she faltered because she’d been afraid of what she’d encounter on the other side. Maybe a mangled, broken version of Archie, maybe a fragile Archie instead of a strong one, an Archie that looks closer to dead than he does alive.

But that isn’t the honest answer because what really stops her is the voice beyond the door, a voice she hasn’t heard in years.

The voice she’d thought she’d never hear again.

She knows it still, the way she knows the lyrics to songs she hasn’t listened to in a while, the way she knows her mother’s voice, her sister’s voice, Archie’s – she still knows his. She knows it’s him.

She knocks twice before creaking the door open just in case he isn’t alone.

But he is.

 

**_6:37 a.m._ **

The first thing she notices is his eyes – they’re red, but not from crying. She knows what that particular red looks like – it’s one that entirely colors the whites of his eyes, and this isn’t that kind of red. He looks tired, like he’s been up all night worried and distraught, and in a way, she hopes that he has been. She hopes that he’s been here with Archie all night since she hadn’t been able to be. Archie would’ve done the same for either of them and he deserves the same in return.

His head rises slowly at the sound of her intruding on what she thinks might’ve been a private moment, but he doesn’t remove his hand. It covers the bridges of Archie’s white-bandaged knuckles, loosely, and just enough for comfort.

He looks older. The lines at the corners of his eyes, the ones that back in the day would activate only when he laughed or smiled, are now etched and drawn onto his face with deeper, more permanent looking strokes. His shoulders, hunched over and carrying a near tangible load of his stress, of his life, of the weight of the world beating down on him, knot and twist his muscles; that much is visible to her even through the Sherpa jacket she thinks might be the same one he’d worn so often a lifetime ago.

He looks like a man now; he’s no longer the boy she once loved.

But it’s still him. He looks older, weary and older.

But he’s still the same him.

“Jughead.” His name is still familiar on her tongue despite the years since she’s voiced it out loud. She tips her head back against the door, pushing it shut with her weight. Right now, the rest of the world doesn’t need to be privy to this; it’s not for them to see. This moment is theirs. It’s all of theirs and no one else’s.

“Hey,” he says. There’s no surprise in his voice at her presence. Just tiredness, just exhaustion.

“I-” she starts. _What can she say to him at a time like this?_ “I didn’t know if you’d be here.”

_What’s the right thing to say?_

“He’s my best friend,” Jughead says, and she hates herself for letting her mind wander here in this moment, but it does.

_If it were her there in that bed, her who’d once been his best friend, her who’d once been so much more than that – would he be here for her, too?_

She highly doubts it, given everything – given their history, given time. But this isn’t about her right now.

Betty crosses the room tentatively, sliding and shuffling her feet instead of picking them up and stepping surely. With her eyes locked on his, she sinks into the empty seat on the other side of Archie, and as her legs give way under her, as her spine curves against the seatback behind her, time finally stops moving so quickly.

“He’s my best friend, too,” she says, ignoring the fact that he’d once shared that same privilege and distinction in her life. Then quietly, with her eyes flicking up to meet his – “it’s been a while.”

Jughead nods slowly. “Ten years,” he says, but gently and almost like a reminder in case she’s forgotten.

She hasn’t.

With hesitant fingers that shake as they bridge the distance and open air, she slips her hand under Archie’s bruised, battered one, and feels a weight she hadn’t known she’d been shouldering - a weight ten years heavy - slip and fall away as the chain of their joined hands across the hospital bed link back together.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics for this and all future chapters from The Chain by Fleetwood Mac
> 
> Tumblr - @heavy-lies-the-crown


	2. Thursday, Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for this chapter - discussion of death and death-related themes. My eternal thanks to the wonderful bugggghead for taking the time to look this over!

_Running in the shadows._

 

**_7:34 a.m._ **

****Thursday – Day 1**  **

He’s been waiting for her to show up.

He knew that she would.

It’s taken her longer than he thought, but even so, the extra time he’s gotten to mentally prepare hasn’t made her in front of him any less jarring.

He doesn’t even think that seeing her now should be all that shocking – he knew she’d be here and she’s almost exactly as he remembers her. She’s little frazzled, but he can’t hold that against her – she’d just hightailed into a room holding within it a bruised and battered Archie. And him there at Archie’s bedside, too. But she still has the same high ponytail, slightly unkempt around the edges but more or less the same, and she still wears the same pink flats with frou-frou decorative ribbons – she’s still the same old Betty Cooper.

 _Not old,_ he corrects himself. She’s not old. She’s old in the sense that he’s known her nearly his entire life, but she’s doesn’t look old in appearance, or even feel old in spirit.

There’s something about having her holding onto Archie’s left hand across from him that has him feeling just like a child again.

That, he supposes, is to be expected, too. Within this room are the two people outside his own parents who have known him the longest, and nothing will ever change that short of turning back time and rewriting history. Short of that pesky, very final thing that he’s doing his utmost not to think about.

 _Don’t you dare bring it down to one, Archie,_ he thinks. _Don’t you goddamn dare._

He zeroes in on the sound of Archie’s heartbeat, slow but still holding steady on the monitor. _These are good sounds,_ he reminds himself. These sounds mean that Archie is still alive; his heart is beating - he’s still alive. _Focus on that,_ he tells himself. _Don’t think about what else it sounds like._

Knock, knock.

Knock, knock. It’s death at your door.

I’m on the way. I’m waiting.

 _Go away,_ he thinks.

_Please, just go away._

 

**_7:36 a.m._ **

She talks first.

“How long have you been here?”

He shouldn’t be irritated by her voice, but he is. He shouldn’t be irritated by her presence either, but he is. If he’s being honest, he doesn’t like that she’s here. He knows she has every right to be – he doesn’t own New York and he sure as hell doesn’t own Archie, but that does nothing in the way of tampering the simple fact that he just doesn’t like that she’s here.

He’s been doing just fine without her and he has been for years. Now, she’s just _here_. She’s here unannounced and sounding a little different than he remembers her sounding. Her voice is lower than he remembers it being and that bothers him, that she’s here messing with his memories.

She’s here messing with his mind.

But he also knows that right here and now isn’t the time nor place to rehash the past, so he shrugs at her. “I’ve been here all night,” he says. “He was already in surgery when I got here so I didn’t see how bad it was initially.”

“Oh. I’m glad.”

“About what?”

“That you didn’t have to see him like that. I wouldn’t have wanted you to.”

That about her is exactly the same – her niceness, her kindness.

“Do you know what happened?” he asks. If she can be civil then he can, too. He can try.

“Mr. Andrews called me,” she tells him quietly, like it’s some kind of big secret. “But, honestly, I missed most of what he said. It felt like a dream, you know?”

He knows.

“The car that hit him was hydroplaning,” he starts. He doesn’t know if this is the right place to start but it’s all he has. “He was crossing the street.”

“Archie hates-”

“The rain,” Jughead finishes. “I know.”

“What was he doing out in it?”

“Just going home, I think.”

“Do you see him often?” she asks.

He shrugs. “Here and there. Probably not as much as I should. Or could.”

 _Definitely not,_ he admits to himself. He could see Archie every day if he’d only make the effort, but he hasn’t put forth an ounce at all. They’re a train ride away from each other, a single, twenty-minute train ride, and the last time he’d seen Archie was at some mutual friend’s housewarming months ago.

And he’d left that early. It hadn’t been his scene. Too many happy couples.

“Where do you live now?” Betty asks.

Persistent with questions, hungry for information – that about her hasn’t changed either.

“Brooklyn.”

“Oh,” she draws out slowly. “I hear that it’s nice there now.”

“It’s fine.”

There’s a pause then, an awesome, giant kind of pause filled only with the steady beat of Archie’s heart.

Knock, knock.

Knock, knock.

“He waited for the light,” he offers eventually. At his voice, her head snaps up from its low bow so quickly that her ponytail almost flips all the way over. “Not that it matters that he waited. He’d probably be better off if he didn’t, you know? If he didn’t wait, and if he’d crossed just a second earlier, he wouldn’t be here right now.”

“Jughead-”

“He didn’t do anything wrong,” he continues, voice rising in frantic desperation. _Stop. Shut up. Shut up, shut up._ “How fucked up is that? That he’s lying here like this now even though he didn’t do a single thing wrong?”

“I know,” Betty whispers, and when she reaches the hand she’s using to hold onto Archie’s out to quickly cover his, he flinches and pulls back.

It’s been years, a literal decade since he’s felt her skin on his. He needs more time to anticipate and see that moment coming before it actually arrives at his doorstep.

He tucks his hand into his jacket pocket.

“Were you talking to him?” she asks, slipping her hand back under Archie’s. “Before I came in?”

“Yeah,” he says. And then defensively, because he thinks there just might be an undertone of mocking in her voice – payback for him pulling his hand away from hers – “So?”

“So nothing,” Betty says, staring back at him sharply. “Keep talking. Familiar voices are probably a good thing. It may wake him up faster.”

“Why don’t you? I’ve been talking to him all night. He’s clearly he’s not waking up for me.”

She looks at him with those wide, worried eyes of hers - they’re the same, too - and clears her throat before parting the lips she’s been biting down on.

“Hey, Arch,” she murmurs, voice turning from sharp to liltingly smooth as she speaks. “It’s me. Betty, if you don’t remember my voice. Or if you don’t remember me.”

“He remembers you,” he hears himself saying.

“I’m sorry that I haven’t seen you in so long. I’m sorry that it took all of this to get me by your side again. I should’ve been here for your birthday, and I’m sorry that all I did was text you. I should’ve called. I know I said I would and I never did. I’m sorry about that. I should’ve been home last Christmas, too, but-” she trails off there, dipping her head down to glance briefly at the hand she has tucked under Archie’s. “You know why I wasn’t home,” she says eventually. “But it doesn’t seem like all that great a reason now.”

It’s on the tip of his tongue to ask what had been so overwhelmingly important to keep her from spending Christmas under Alice Cooper’s perfectly decorated roof, but he holds back.

The less he knows about her, the better. It had taken him a beat to get over her, and while he doesn’t think he’s anywhere close to falling back into that black hole again - the one better known as Betty Cooper and the very large, flaming torch he’d once carried for her - he sees no reason to chance it either.

“Arch,” she calls out again. She has such a lyrical voice, so soft and soothing, almost like music. He thinks that if she wanted to, she could make a great career out of reading audiobooks or making instructional videos. But the last he’d heard through the Riverdale grapevine is that she’s been working for some newspaper up in Rhode Island, and that’s probably a much better use of her time. And her mind – he’s sure it’s still brilliant.

“Archie,” she tries once more, gently shaking his hand. “Arch.”

Nothing.

“Well, that’s okay,” she concedes eventually, voice so affectedly bright and bubbly that he has half a mind to tell her to cut it out. “That’s okay. We’ll be here when you’re ready to get up. I’m not leaving until you do.”

And this, he figures, is as good a time as any to cut and run.

“So, uh,” he starts, half-regretting that he hadn’t just up and walked out of the room. She’s not his keeper – not anymore, at least. “I have to go to work.”

“Work,” she repeats slowly, enunciating each letter like she’s never quite heard the word before.

“That thing you go to everyday to earn your bread?”

“You have to go to work?”

“I know it might be hard to believe, but yeah, I have a job.” He doesn’t mean to be snide with her, but he’s tired and he thinks she might be looking at him like him and the concept of a job are the most unbelievable things to ever cross paths in this universe.

“Work,” she says again slowly. “I should be there right now. At work.”

“Oh,” he says blankly – that lost look on her face maybe hadn’t been about him after all.

“I didn’t tell anyone,” she continues, eyes growing wide. She looks so much like the childhood version of herself when she does that. “I didn’t tell anyone at my office that I wouldn’t be there today.”

“So just call them now. Tell them an emergency came up. It’s not like you’re lying.”

“Right,” she says, popping up out of her seat and feeling around her jeans and jacket for her phone. “You’re right, that’s what I should-”

“Betty,” Fred Andrews interrupts, and when she spins around, her ponytail whips out violently with her, nearly catching him in the face. He’s forgotten how buoyant and free flowing her hair can be sometimes, even tied up in a ponytail. His is, for the most part, always tucked under his beanie, and he’s forgotten how that ponytail of hers so often acts like an extension of her.

Back in the day, he’d gotten used to ducking and swaying around it. He’s out of practice now.

“Mr. Andrews, hi,” Betty says, moving swiftly over to Archie’s dad and hugging him tightly, without preamble and without hesitation. “It’s so good to see you.”

To him, Fred Andrews looks like he hadn’t expected the hug. _But he should’ve,_ he thinks, because it’s Betty. She’s always been a hugger. He’s honestly half surprised that he hadn’t been the recipient of one, despite their messy history. “It’s good to see you too, Betty,” Fred says. “Thanks for coming.”

“I wanted to be here,” Betty says. “There’s no need to thank me.” _She makes it look so easy,_ he thinks. He doesn’t know when she last saw Fred Andrews, but it may as well be yesterday with the way they’re hugging each other, like no time has passed at all. “Archie will get through this, Mr. Andrews. There’s no one stronger than him. He _will_ get through this.”

She’s always been good with parents – her parents, Archie’s, his own.

Yet another thing about her that hasn’t changed.

He finds himself wondering what has.

“I know,” Fred says, leading Betty back towards her chair. “He’ll be happy to see you when he wakes up.”

 _They’re so optimistic_. Even after all these years, even with Archie lying mangled in front of them with his red hair stark against the white of his bandages, they’re still optimistic. They’re still glass half-full, the sun always rises, silver-lining kinds of people.

It’s highly irritating.

It’s completely unrealistic and irrational.

Which makes him think that now is exactly the time for him to take his pessimism and gracefully exit before he brings them down with him, too.

“Hey, so,” Jughead interrupts. He’s instantly anxious when Fred turns to him with his kind, bushy eyebrows raised in question.

He can’t place why he’s as nervous as he is around Fred Andrews, why he feels like he’s ten again and facing up to his mother after knocking over her favorite hideous vase. He figures it has something to do with the fact that even though he’s in his third decade of life and even older than his mother had been when he’d actually knocked over the vase, being in the presence of a parent – any parent – will always have him feeling like a child.

He hasn’t felt this particular type of childish youth in a while and to some degree, it’s nice that he can still feel that way.

“I should-”

“You should go, Jughead,” Betty finishes for him, but gently and in no way dismissively. “I’ll let you know if anything changes.”

“Oh,” he says, staring at her with what he’s sure is the most pathetic of blank looks. That’d been exactly what he’d been gearing up to ask, and the fact that he doesn’t have to now leaves him with a store of unspent courage he’s unsure of what to do with. “Thanks. That’s – thanks. You can call or text if anything changes. My number is-”

“I still have it,” she admits quietly. “If it’s the same as before.”

He can feel how rapidly he’s blinking at her, and he’s acutely aware of Fred awkwardly digging his hands into his pockets and turning his head to the ceiling in an attempt to give them the space they don’t have in the overcrowded hospital room.

“It’s the same,” he says eventually, coughing out the catch in his throat.

“Okay,” she says, nodding along. “I’ll keep you updated. Mine’s-”

Hers hasn’t changed either, he realizes as she begins rattling off the numbers to him. It’s been ten years, and all that he’s found different about her so far is the pitch of her voice, and he partly chalks that up to his own inaccurate, faded memories.

“I still have it,” he cuts in quickly before she has a chance to finish. Her eyes snap to his, surprised and maybe even just a little bit hopeful. He doesn’t quite know what to make of that. “I still have yours, too.”

 

**_12:47 p.m._ **

He tries to curb it, but he feels his anger slowly growing at work. What had been a low simmer before is now actively bubbling, fizzing, and sizzling as it boils over and hits the flame.

He’s gone from simply disliking her presence here to actively hating it, and there’s a part of him that hates _himself_ for feeling this way. He isn’t thrilled that he’s feeling anything towards her save for indifference and apathy, and the fact that he’s now thrumming with visceral anger is completely less than ideal.

If his memory is serving him right, and he knows that it is because he remembers the day like ten long, full years haven’t passed between, they hadn’t ended the story of them on what he’d call nice terms.

Correction – _he_ hadn’t ended the story of them on what he’d call nice terms.

He remembers Archie’s phone call to him late one night in November long gone, the first November they’d all spent away at college and away from Riverdale. Archie had been so drunk, so belligerent that he’d barely been able to make out his best friend’s garbled words – Veronica had dumped him, Archie had slurred, for some guy with numerals at the end of his name and a trust fund. And she’d dumped him over the phone, too.

 _What kind of person does that,_ Archie had asked, over and over. _What kind of rude, unfeeling, insensitive person would break up with someone they’ve known and loved for years over the phone?_

 _I don’t know, man,_ he’d responded back – Archie had been crying openly by that point and he hadn’t known what else to say. _I don’t know what kind of person does that._

Except that he does.

He’d done the exact same thing a year later.

But in his defense, he wasn’t about to hop a plane just to dump a girl. At the time, that had simply seemed impossible for his checking account, which had been dancing dangerously close to single digits and an overdrawn notice.

And, there’d been the fact that he just hadn’t wanted to. He hadn’t wanted to see her mouth pull down in a frown caused both by him and for him. He hadn’t wanted to see her tears build and spill over those wide eyes of hers because of something he’d said to her. He hadn’t wanted to see her face because he knew himself – that face would’ve stopped him from doing what he thought needed to be done.

After he’d brought the axe down on them both, he’d thought about calling Archie back with the answer.

A coward, he’d wanted to tell Archie. Coward, for a million dollars.

The kind of rude, unfeeling, insensitive person that breaks up with someone they’ve known and loved for years over the phone like that is nothing more than a coward.

 

**_1:30 p.m._ **

When her name flashes across his phone’s screen, he nearly knocks it off his desk in shock.

He’d been expecting some kind of update from her – that isn’t what gets him. She’d promised him that she would, and whatever anger or hate she might feel for him now will never, in the good book of Betty, be catalyst enough for her to renege on a promise.

What he hadn’t expected was the small black heart next to her name.

He stares at it.

 

**_1:31 p.m._ **

He hadn’t been the one to put it there.

In his opinion, text messages are for exactly that – messages made of text and text alone. They’re _not_ for inane little pictures of cats and other animals laugh-crying or martini glasses and the like. But she’d liked those pictures, once upon a time. She’d liked them so much that she’d decided one night while he was sleeping or writing or simply not paying attention that she’d wanted one next to her name on his phone.

 _But it could be a black heart_ , she’d told him, laughing shyly as she’d shown him, because she’d be kind and refrain from subjecting him to anything red or pink.

It had made her smile so he’d left it there, even though he hadn’t thought a black heart was that much of an improvement.

He doesn’t understand how it’s still there now – he’d been so sure he’d gotten rid of it years ago. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to get rid of her on his phone entirely, but he’s almost positive he’d gotten rid of at least that.

Apparently not.

 _Archie’s still stable but unchanged_ , he reads. _His doctor should be by later._

He breathes out a sigh of relief. He didn’t think anything miraculous or terrible had happened – Betty would’ve called if it had – but _‘he’s unchanged’_ is better than _‘he’s worse.’_

Or he’s dead.

 _Thanks_ , Jughead types back.

Then, before she has any chance to respond, he pulls up her contact card and replaces the heart with what he’d thought had been there all along – Cooper.

Betty Cooper. No pictures, no hearts – just Betty Cooper.

 _That’s right,_ he thinks as he tucks his phone away into his pocket, and that’s all the thought he needs and wants to devote to it. There’s no need for him to mourn what he’d thought had been gone long ago.

Because she’s been gone for a long time now - Betty with the black heart.

She’s been gone for years.

 

**_2:52 p.m._ **

“Jughead,” he hears someone call, and immediately he slams his hand down on his keyboard in an effort to make it look like he’s accomplished something today.

He hasn’t.

“How’s the review goi – you, uh, okay man?”

“What?” Jughead asks. He means that genuinely – he truly hadn’t heard.

“You look unwell.”

 _Unwell,_ he thinks.

Unwell.

That’s putting it lightly and yet, not at all.

He isn’t well. He isn’t well in the slightest. He’s had his entire past come and slap him right back in the face after a decade of ignoring and moving past it, and he’s felt nothing but guilt of the deepest order since they’d wheeled in Archie, unconscious and wearing a hospital gown, and he’d realized how long it’d been since he’d actually seen the man he dares call his best friend.

Then, he’d spent the better part of the night thinking and wondering why it wasn’t him there in that bed instead. If the worth of a life is measured by good, then there’s no reason in the world why it should be Archie and not him lying there wounded and broken. Archie’s the one with the sunny disposition and a tendency to look on the bright side of life, Archie’s the one who’s put the bulk of the work into preserving their friendship.

He’s the one that’s sullen and cynical. The world needs more people like Archie, not more people like him.

Those thoughts – that maybe he should be the one battling death instead Archie, that so much wrong can befall someone so good – those thoughts make him insurmountably unwell.

And yet, all things considered, he’s perfectly well. He’s just fine. He isn’t the one unconscious in a hospital bed, he isn’t the one hooked up to machines that for all he knows, may be breathing for Archie. He has all four limbs, all ten fingers, and all ten toes.

He’s perfectly well.

Archie is the one that isn’t.

“Flu,” he says eventually, throwing in a loud, dry cough for good measure. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Go home, Jughead,” he’s told. “Work from home if you have to, but don’t do it here.”

“I’m really not-”

“That wasn’t a request.”

Any other day he’d argue with a bit more gusto, but right now he doesn’t have the energy or the willpower to do it.

He doesn’t think that his post by Archie’s bedside is in any way a less exhausting place to be, not by the longest shot, but today, it feels like the _right_ place for him to be.

It feels like where he should be.

And it’s where he wants to be.

 

**_3:49 p.m._ **

He does his best, but it still takes him nearly an hour to get back to the hospital. He knocks twice, less for whoever might be there on the other side of the door, and more so for himself. It’s wishful in every sense of the word, but he’d hoped that he’d hear Archie’s voice on the other side telling him to get his ass in there.

Instead, he’s greeted by a hooded-eyed Fred Andrews and her.

“Hey,” Betty says, double-taking as he creeps through the door. “You’re back early.”

He knows perfectly well that he shouldn’t be looking for a fight with her, not at a time like this and with Archie’s dad listening in, no less. Any offense he’s finding in her words is very likely unintentional because that’s not who she is.

That lovely line of logical reasoning, however, gets him absolutely nowhere.

“I usually work longer hours than this,” he snaps back. _Stop it_ , he tries to tell himself. _Just stop it_. “I would’ve been later.”

There’s a flash of fight that crosses her narrowed eyes as she faces him with squared shoulders. “I never said that you- forget it. Here,” she says instead, rising out of her chair. “You can sit with Archie, I’m going to get coffee. Mr. Andrews, would you like anything?”

He doesn’t miss that she’s staring straight and resolutely at him even as she addresses the older man.

“I’m good, Betty, thanks,” Fred tells her.

Then, with a swish of that ponytail of hers, the one he’d tugged once as kid before he even had the wherewithal to sort out that he like-liked her, the one that she’d used to tuck right under his chin as he held her while they fell asleep in front of Netflix true crime documentaries, she marches right out the door.

He claims the chair she’d left and grudgingly admits to himself that he could’ve handled that better.

 

**_3:50 p.m._ **

“So how long has it been since you’ve seen each other?” Fred asks once the heavy door to the hospital room swings shut.

He cringes.

He hadn’t meant for it to be that obvious.

“Ten years,” Jughead admits – there’s no point in beating around the bush here. Not with Fred. Not to himself. What had become of them is in no way a secret. “Give or take.”

“I’m sorry, Jughead. I forgot that you two were once-”

“Mr. Andrews,” he interrupts, but not unkindly, tiredly maybe, but hopefully not unkindly. “All that stuff with me and her was a lifetime ago. I’ve moved on. She’s moved on – none of what happened back then matters or applies to right now. We’re both just here for Archie.”

“A decade doesn’t a lifetime make, Jughead,” he’s told slowly and wisely. “But maybe you need a few more of them under your belt to really understand that.”

It hangs unspoken in the air then, that nagging little question, that big pink, stomping elephant in the room.

_Will Archie get those decades?_

Jughead hopes he does. He hopes more than anything that Archie does.

“Maybe not,” Jughead agrees eventually. “But the rest of it is true.”

And it is. Maybe once in his life he’d thought that Betty Cooper had been it for him – the Big It – and maybe once in his life he’d thought, too, that he’d never quite get over her.

But he’s done just fine without her for years, and from the looks of it, she’s done perfectly fine without him, too.

“Are you sorry she’s here?”

It takes him a minute to realize that he’s the one being talked to, and it takes him another to digest the question; it’s a loaded one, with all the weight in the world attached to it. _Fred is digging,_ Jughead realizes, and not especially subtlety at that.

But then again, subtlety has never been any of the Andrews’ strong suit.

“No,” he says eventually. “She’s Archie’s best friend – she should be here when he wakes up. He’d want her here.”

“I think he’ll be happy that you’re here with her.”

He’d known this was coming.

But his clairvoyance doesn’t make this moment any more fun or exciting to approach.

“Mr. Andrews,” Jughead says again, thinking how very strange it is that he’s never called Fred Andrews by simply Fred. Even after all this time. “I’m happy that Betty’s here. _For Archie._ But Betty and I-”

He trails off then, holding back the words he’d almost said. He’d be lying if he’d said that it’d been a while since he’d thought about her that way, in the her-and-I way. He’s had a handful of girlfriends, some serious, most of them not, but none ever like her. But he tries not to put much stock into it – it’s only natural that she’s different than the rest. She was his first in so many ways.

The first girl-friend he’d ever made.

The first girlfriend he’d ever had.

The first woman he’d ever loved.

The rest don’t have the privilege of knowing what he’d looked like with a bowl cut and without his beanie. They don’t know how he’d started to hunch over when he’d reached his growth spurt early at age ten – they’ve never known him quite like she does. They don’t have the time on him she has, they don’t know the entire history of him.

He thinks about that, about her, often enough. But at the end of the day, however often she invades his mind, it still doesn’t defeat one simple, glaring fact.

“Betty and I are nothing.”

“She used to mean the world to you, Jughead.”

“Is Mrs. Andrews here?” He’s venturing far, far into places he shouldn’t, but there’s a part of him – the part of him that _does_ have thirty years under his belt, no matter how insignificant Fred Andrews may think those years to be - that feels like that gives him at least some leeway to be frank with Archie’s dad, man to man.

“She’s down at the café.”

Jughead forges ahead while he still has the privacy to do so. He doesn’t know why they’re using this time now to rehash their sad, respective love lives, but he’s also not quite sure what else he’s supposed to talk to Archie’s dad about.

 _Well, Archie,_ he supposes, but that’s a sensitive conversation topic at best.

“You don’t still love Archie’s mom, do you?” Jughead asks. “After all these years of her doing her own thing, of you doing yours – there’s respect there, sure. Maybe some mutual kind of... I don’t know – affection, even. But not love. Right?”

“Of course I still love her, Jughead,” Fred Andrews tells him, slowly and gently in the way he’s always spoken to him. It’s the same way he’s always spoken to Archie, too. “Maybe not the way I did when we were younger, but of course I do. I’ll always love her.”

Jughead breathes shallowly as he waits for the rest of the answer. So far, it hasn’t been what he’s expected. Or wanted to hear.

“You know, there are different kinds of love in this world. And it’s taken me a long time to learn that, but there are. You don’t always love someone the way you did when you were ten or twenty years old. I think that the way you love can change. But it’s still love, plain and simple.”

“But do you still love her because of Archie?” Jughead clarifies. “Do you still love her because she’s Archie’s mom, or do you love her because she’s her?”

A son, a child – he could see how that would change things in the name of love. But as it stands, he isn’t in a position to know.

“I don’t know that I can separate the two,” Fred says eventually. “Life isn’t that black and white. There aren’t bright lines in the sand like that. But I do know that I still love her in my own way. I don’t think love just dies like that – it’s something that lingers. Love is something that remains.”

He rolls his neck from left to right, considering the older man’s words. It’s definitely a different approach to love, and it’s not one that he’s considered before.

But he’s also unsure if it’s one that he personally subscribes to.

“I loved her once,” Jughead says eventually. “I did – as friends, as more than that. As someone I thought I’d share and spend my life with. But Mr. Andrews, the difference between you and me is that you _do_ have Archie. You and Mrs. Andrews share Archie in common and you always will. Betty and I don’t have anything like that.” The repeated words, her name from his mouth and in his voice are starting to feel less foreign. He doesn’t know how he feels about that. “Betty and I are nothing anymore. We have nothing anymore.”

“You have each other. That’s worth more than you think. You have thirty years of knowing each other, too.”

 _Yes,_ Jughead supposes. They do have those thirty years between them.

“And you do have Archie in common,” Fred tells him, taking his son’s hand in his own. “Isn’t that why you’re both here now?”

 

**_4:02 p.m._ **

He’s on edge again when Mary Andrews quietly enters Archie’s room, her red hair is so much less vibrant than he remembers and now painted with streaks of grey. He hadn’t expected that. Maybe he should’ve, but he hadn’t.

He doesn’t like it.

It’s too acute a reminder right now – the passage of time, the inevitability of the end – and he’d rather not think about it.

“Jughead,” she greets, coming towards him with arms outstretched and held wide open. “It’s so good of you to be here.”

“Hi, Mrs. Andrews,” he says, hugging back.

Over Mary Andrews’ shoulder, he watches as Betty quietly and politely steps into the room. _It’s ridiculous,_ he thinks – they’re all being ridiculous with their hushed tones and tiptoeing feet. They all want Archie to wake up, don’t they? It’s one of the only things they all share in common now.

They should be stomping while they walk, slamming doors, and screaming at the top of their lungs, damn whoever else might be here looking for peace and quiet.

“Thank you for being here when we couldn’t be,” Mary tells him, hand shaking his cheek gently. He’s an adult now, or so he’s been told. But he supposes to parents, he never will be. “It’s so good to see you again, Jughead.”

“I wish it didn’t have to be like this,” Betty interrupts.

And just like that, he’s frustrated with her all over again.

 _Was she talking to you?_ he wants to ask. She has a family. She has a sister and a mother and a father that all still talk to each other.

Archie is, for all intents and purposes, _his_ brother. Fred Andrews was the man who’d given _him_ shaving tips when his own father hadn’t and Mary Andrews had been the one to fix a band-aid over _his_ knee when he’d scraped it falling off his bike.

This was supposed to be his moment, not hers.

“We all don’t, Betty,” Mary says, reaching her right hand out for Betty’s while taking his own firmly in her left. “But the fact that you’re both here - that all _three_ of you are back in the same room again after all these years – I know that’s going to make Archie so happy when he wakes up.”

_When._

Not _if_ , but _when_.

The Andrews’ may be his second family by proxy – they may have been the ones that had taken him in and put a roof over his head, they may have been the ones that had helped him grow up.

But she’s the one that really fits in with them.

“Has Dr. Bergson been by yet?” Mary asks, a mother to her son even as he lies unconscious in front of her. “He really should’ve been here to check in by now.”

“I’ll go check,” Betty offers quickly. “You both stay with Archie. I’ll go.”

“You’re good at that.”

He feels his head cloud when all eyes swing to him in shock and awe. There’s a slow, creeping heat that climbs up the back of his spine as Betty’s lips purse at him, and when her shoulders tense and draw back, he defends himself by following suit.

He hadn’t meant to voice that particular thought out loud. He hadn’t meant to make any of this about him or them. It’d just slipped out.

“Can I see you? Outside?” Betty asks.

When her hand clamps down hard on his arm and tugs him in the direction of the door, he knows it’s not up for debate.

 

**_4:05 p.m._ **

“What?” he asks when she’s dragged him far enough down the hall and out of earshot of Archie’s room.

He knows what. He knows exactly what.

But he also doesn’t know what else to say.

“What is wrong with you?” she starts, hands on her hips and chin jutting towards him as she hisses out her words.

“Noth-”

“Seriously, what is _wrong_ with you? Why would you think that _right now_ is the time to make this about you and me?”

“Please stop yelling, people are look-”

“Archie parents don’t need this, so if that’s what you came here to do _, just leave_. If you have a problem with me – fine. You and I can hash that out later. But right now Archie may be dyi– he could be dyi-”

It happens quickly – her anger melts and slides off her face as she catches twice on the word that he suspects they’ve both done their utmost not to think about. A barbaric yelp rips from the back of her throat, echoing so loudly against the linoleum tiles that even she looks shocked at the inhumanness of the sound that’s just come from her own vocal chords. The finger that she’s been pointing at him shakes before it falls to her side.

Then come her tears – big, round, fat globes from the corners of her eyes that scrape off the ridge of her cheekbones to puddle pathetically on the ground.

He lets her cry it out at first, turning his head away to a water-marked spot on the ceiling in an effort to give her what little privacy he can; it’s what he feels like doing right now and he can’t fault her for giving in. He wants to so badly – to cry, to kick and scream, to flip some furniture.

He figures that at least one of them should get the privilege of breaking down.

But her choked sniffles grow into full on wails the longer he tries not to pay attention to her, and the louder she gets, the more narrowed eyes, washed over in embarrassment for them, turn and stare.

“Hey, Betty, it’s okay,” he offers weakly when he can no longer stand the sound. He almost laughs at the absurdity of his own words.

 _Of course it’s not._ What a thing to say at a time like this.

“Are you crazy?” she mutters out through a series of wet sniffles. “There’s nothing about this that’s even close to okay.”

Betty Cooper – he’ll never get one by her.

“Just-” he starts, patting her shoulder as comfortingly as he can, which even he knows is not comforting in the slightest. “Please just stop crying.”

_“I’m trying to!”_

“Okay,” he says quickly. “Okay. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”

Even after all this time, he feels the beat of his own heart slow and steady when the stinging sound of her cries subside, absorbing and bleeding into the walls that he knows have heard it all before, so many times over. Under his hand, the violent and unpredictable shake of her shoulders stabilizes and stills.

Then it’s quiet again.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats when the sounds from her reduce to nothing but the errant hiccup here and there. “I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

And that, he truly means. Whatever he’d meant or hadn’t ultimately doesn’t defeat the simple fact that right now is hardly the time or the place to dive back into emotions so ancient he hadn’t known he still had even the carbon copies of.

She angles her shoulders away from him and brushes her knuckles under either eye. “We should go find Archie’s doctor,” she says to him eventually.

He gives her a moment before responding, one more moment to pull herself back together and  to take a deep, shuddering breath before she pushes her own self back into reality.

“Lead the way,” he tells her.

He follows her down the twists and turns of the halls he wants to run from, and does his best to keep his head down and his eyesight averted from the doors of the sick and broken that he’d rather not think about.

 _How many people will never again walk out of here,_ he wonders. _How many people are on their last line?_

“You used to be so much better at that,” she whispers.

“At what?”

“This,” she says, gesturing back to the place they’d stood before. “The whole comforting thing. You’re terrible at it now.”

It feels wrong, sacrilegious even to laugh within the confines of a hospital, but he does. Not too loudly, not too obviously, and not for long enough to draw anyone’s attention but hers, but he laughs.

“I’m surprised you remember,” he says.

She stares ahead so steadfastly and relentlessly that he knows she’s forcing herself to look at anywhere but him. “Of course I do,” she murmurs when it’s just them walking down a white hallway. “I wouldn’t forget that.”

 

**_10:47 p.m._ **

He ends up being the one to break their unsteady truce. It’s completely unintentional on his part, but he doesn’t think that matters to her.

“How’re we all doing?” a nurse asks, head down and buried into a chart he doesn’t even think is Archie’s.

“As well as we can be,” Fred replies. They’re all standing, he realizes as he runs through the roster of everyone in the room, on their toes and leaning forward as if this is the only way to receive information about how Archie might be doing. “Is his doctor coming by any time soon?”

The nurse’s eyes flick upward briefly. “Soon. Within the hour.”

He watches as Mary Andrews’ entire body slumps against Fred’s, who in turn tips his head up to the ceiling in some sort of relief or thanks to the great above.

“And who are you two?” the nurse asks, waving the back of her pen at the space between him and Betty.

“Oh!” Betty starts, stamping a wide, bright smile across her face. It looks pained and tired – the whole of her does, even her ponytail. “I’m Archie’s... sister.”

 _“What?”_ he scoffs out reflexively. “No, you’re no-” he trails off at her wide eyes staring so hard into him that he feels a visceral, heavy weight from them alone, at the tight shake of her head in his direction. “I mean, yeah, she’s my sister,” he says, gesturing in Betty’s direction. She’s monumentally pissed at him, he can tell without even looking at her. “Archie’s our brother.”

He thinks that even if he hadn’t executed his delivery as poorly as he had, it can’t be entirely on him that they aren’t believed for a second.

For one, very few families would have three children with such vastly different hair colors. He’s sure that families like those must be out there in the world, but as it stands, he doesn’t know of any outside television cartoons.

He and Betty also don’t particularly _look_ like Archie, either, red hair aside.

“You two need to leave,” the nurse tells them. “Only family members are allowed to stay past visiting hours.”

“No, no!” Betty argues. “I am family! I’m really his sister. I’m Betty... Andrews.”

“Ma’am, I know when I’m being lied to.” He almost laughs when she cringes at the word _‘ma’am’_ – she still hates it, likely because it still reminds her of her mother.

“Fine,” Betty relents. “What time do visiting hours start?”

“Ten.”

 _“Ten?”_ she blurts out, voice climbing to a near screech. “Not eight or nine? What kind of idiotic rule is-”

“We’ll be back at ten tomorrow,” he interrupts, catching her gaze out of the corner of his own. _Stop_ , he hopes he’s saying to her. _You’ll get us both kicked out of here indefinitely if you don’t._

He knows she’s nothing short of furious even before he turns back to her, but that in no way makes the way she’s looking at him any easier to confront. The hard lines of her mouth tug firm and pull sharply down, and at her neck, a raised blue vein bulges and hums.

For a moment, he’s sixteen, eighteen, twenty again and facing up to her after he’s unwittingly shoved his foot into his mouth, after he’s fought too dirty with her and said something that hit too far below the belt.

 

**_10:49 p.m._ **

“Betty,” Fred Andrews calls over to her, voice so wrapped in warmth and concern that Jughead forgets for a moment that the man isn’t talking to his own child. “Do you have somewhere to go tonight?”

“Oh,” she draws out slowly. For once in her life, he realizes that she’s at a loss. “My car’s in the parking lot, I can just sleep there.”

“Are you sure? There must be a hotel or something near-”

“I don’t mind. It’s a big car.”

“Is that safe?”

“I think it should be-”

“Betty, you can stay with me,” he hears himself saying. “I have a couch.”

It’s instantly still after the offer that he can’t swallow back. Although he doesn’t want to take it back - not really. It’s very likely his fault that she’s homeless for the night and the least he can do is offer up his couch to the woman he once shared his bed with.

Knock, knock.

Knock, knock.

 _Not now,_ he thinks. _Not right now._

“I have the car,” she tells him, tight-lipped.

“Betty, maybe you should go with Jughead,” Mary Andrews encourages, and in another time, another life, he thinks he might’ve looked a little harder for potential matchmaking; she always had liked the idea of them together. “You’d be more comfortable there. And safer, too. Honey, I just don’t like the idea of you spending the night in a parking lot. Who knows who or what might walk in there.”

He watches as her eyes swing helplessly from him to Archie’s parents, then once more back to him. He knows what she’s thinking – that she’s so blindly angry with him that she’d much rather spend the night sleeping in right angles in her car just to spite him. But that she also doesn’t want Fred and Mary worrying about her right now when there’s someone else they should be devoting their energy to.

That her anger and her doing the right thing are very unfortunately pitted on either side of the same coin, and it’s up to her to decide how she wants it to land.

“Okay,” she agrees quietly, folding her pink trench over her arm. “Jughead, let’s go.”

She says what comes next quietly, and he doesn’t know if it’s meant for him, her, or for the world at large – a warning, a promise, and maybe even a challenge all at once.

“Just tonight.”

 

**_10:59 p.m._ **

He doesn’t like the silence she’s imposing on them, but he figures it’s the lesser of two evils; he’s sure that whatever she has to say to him eventually will be a hell of a lot worse than her saying nothing now.

And, if she’s anything like the Betty Cooper he’d known ten years ago, she’ll have something to say to him very soon.

“You had to throw me under the bus, didn’t you?” she bites out eventually.

“I already said I was sorry,” he says. _Don’t accuse. Don’t yell. Don’t raise your voice. This was technically your fault._ “What more do you want?”

“I want to be back in that room!”

“Well, that’s tough because you can’t be! And neither can I!”

She folds her lips into the thinnest of lines as she shakes her head at him. “I could’ve been if you’d just kept your mouth shut.”

The elevator groans tiredly when it stutters and slides open, protesting its thankless day of work, but she doesn’t seem to care. With both her hands clawed around the dinged metal, she throws her weight behind it and shoves the door open, leaving him to follow her heated footsteps.

 

**_11:01 p.m._ **

“I can drive if you want,” he offers when they reach her car.

“No need. I can drive,” she says flatly. “I’m not tired.”

“That’s not why I offered.”

“You think I’m too emotional to drive, don’t you?” she says, turning so quickly and violently to face him that her tote swings and bumps him in the side. “ _Emotional_ Betty Cooper, who knows what she’ll do next, right? Maybe she’ll run the car right into a pole! Maybe she’ll drive it off the Brooklyn Bridge! Better take the keys away from her because who knows what the hell she’ll do next! You know what?” she says, bringing up her pointed finger inches from his nose. “This is misogyny at its finest. And I would’ve never expected it from _you_ of all people, but here we are.”

“You done?” he mutters back.

There’s a beat before she answers. “Yes.”

“I asked because it’s parallel parking only in Brooklyn. So unless you’ve learned how to in the last ten years-”

He watches as her face decends into embarrassment, shoulders turning into themselves for a heartbeat of a moment before she pulls them back straight, turns her nose upward, and paints herself over with pride.

“Fine,” she says, tossing him the keys, deliberately short just so he’ll have to reach forward for them. “Don’t crash it.”

 

**_11:03 p.m._ **

When he leans forward in search for the ignition, he catches her name scrawled on a slip of paper sitting on the dash.

He knows exactly what that piece of paper represents, because he’s gotten a handful of them before. But to his knowledge, she never has until now.

 _There it is_ , he thinks. And finally, too.

_The thing about her that’s different._

A speeding ticket.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says, balancing his arm on the headrest behind him as he backs out of the space. “It’s just – pot calling the kettle black, don’t you think?”

He watches as she tracks his gaze from the dash back to him, and holds back a laugh as she snatches the up ticket and stuffs it away in the glovebox, out of sight and out of mind.

“Just go.”

“Whatever you say.”

 

**_11:04 p.m._ **

When he pulls out of the parking lot, the rain falls hard onto the windshield.

He looks over to her when he remembers how she used to love the rain, how she’d dragged him out into a thunderstorm once just so she could feel the water fall on her face. Just so she could taste it in her mouth.

 _“It’s like a gift,”_ she’d said to him. _“Something so refreshing, something so cleansing falling freely from the sky like this – this rain is a gift, Jug.”_

Now, her eyes are cast downward as they stare unwaveringly at her hands folded in her lap; she looks like she can’t bring herself to look at the rain.

She looks like she hates it.

It’s a strange feeling, to have his heart go out to this girl once again, but it does. He knows that it has so many times before while they grew up safely sheltered in their little town; it’s gone out to her so many times while he loved her. But he doesn’t remember that it had ever felt quite like this.

It’s like an iron hand over his heart, squeezing and pulling harder each time he tries to ignore it. It twists sharply when he looks over at her, head tilted against the window and the silhouette of raindrops dotted and painted across her face – the shadow of the tears he knows she’s holding back.

He wonders how similar it is, this feeling now – his heart reaching across the great divide out to her.

He wonders how different it is.

 

**_11:20 p.m._ **

“Why do you keep switching lanes?”

“Because I can run faster than that guy’s driving,” he says, nodding his head in the direction of the car already in their background.

“Well, you shouldn’t. You’ve already done it three times in the last ten blocks. We could hydroplane.”

“We’re not going to hydroplane. That’s not how that works.”

“The car that hit Archie did,” she says flatly. “How do you know? I highly doubt that _it_ thought it was going to hydroplane either.”

This, he realizes, has very little to do with his driving and everything to do with her head and heart still spiritually keeping vigil at Archie’s bedside. She’s irritating him with the way she’s pointedly staring daggers at him, but even so, he feels for her. Again, he feels for her.

He knows how terrible she must be feeling right now because he’s not feeling great himself, and when it comes down to it, he doesn’t want to make this night any worse for her than it already is.

He slows down and stays in his lane.

 

**_11:49 p.m._ **

They’ve been circling the five blocks around his apartment for half an hour.

“Could you not have gotten something smaller than a tank?” he mutters, pulling out of the space and starting back down the block. There’s no way he’s making this spot work, parallel parking prowess notwithstanding.

“It was all they had. I don’t enjoy driving this monster truck around any more than you do. What about that one?” she says, pointing out to a space in the distance.

“There’s a no parking sign right there.”

“Who’s going to see it? We’ll be back at the hospital before they start checking.”

He scoffs then, adding an extra tap on the gas for emphasis as he drives them past the open space. “I don’t know what the meter maids do up in Providence, but this is New York, Betty. They’ll see it. Especially given this eyesore of a color you picked.”

“Will you stop shitting on the car?” she snaps, rounding on him and slapping her hand down against the armrest. Immediately, he draws his hand to his head in an effort to push out the already thumping headache residing there. He hadn’t meant to get her going again. “The fact that this hunk of junk can compete in Monster Jam or that it’s the color of _goddamn sunshine_ has nothing to do with me.”

“Fine,” he says, pressing his fingers against his temples. _Don’t engage. Don’t engage, don’t engage._ “Sorry.”

“You’re not sorry,” she mutters.

“Can you stop antagonizing me every chance you get? What is with you?”

“I’m not _antagonizing_ you-”

“-if it’s not the way I brake, then it’s the way I-”

“- _with_ me? There’s nothing _with_ me. If there’s anyone antagonizing-”

“-insert yourself absolutely everywhere, you have an opinion on absolutely every-”

“-tired of dealing with your sullen, moping, _shit_ mood ever since I walked through the-”

“-it’s like ever since you got here, all you’ve tried to do is piss me-”

“-make everything about you, and honestly, you’ve been the one pissing me– there’s one.”

“What?”

“There,” she says throwing out her hand, so hard and so full of pent-up energy that it cracks loudly against the side of the car. “There’s a spot.”

As he maneuvers her mammoth of a car into the space she directs him to, he catches her discreetly rubbing the side of her hand against her jeans. He thinks about asking her if she’s okay, but he decides against it. Talking to her right now is plain tiring, and he’s exhausted enough as it is.

But he hopes she’s okay. And he hopes that she knows that.

 

**_11:57 p.m._ **

In another life, he might’ve been embarrassed to let her into his apartment and life like this. He isn’t that messy a person by nature, but he knows that his threshold for messiness far surpasses hers, and the state of his apartment right now definitely falls closer to his end of the spectrum.

But tonight, he can’t bring himself to care.

“You can have the bed,” he offers, holding his arm over the door to allow her through.

“The couch is fine.”

“Betty, seriously,” he says. “You drove all night and sat in a hospital chair all day – just take the bed.”

“I’m not tired.” There’s no fight in her voice this time, no fire. But there’s fear, he realizes. Not a lot of it, but it’s there and discernable just the same.

He understands, he thinks. It has something to do with time, with alertness and with the desire to be here and present for every moment of what comes next. If Archie wakes up in the next eight hours or if he dies – he knows he doesn’t want to be sleeping when that time comes, whatever it may bring. He figures she doesn’t want to be either.

And, it has a little to do with masochism because there’s no way she isn’t exhausted – he definitely is and he isn’t the one who’d driven all night from two states away to be by Archie’s side. But Archie is fighting death right now and with no one there to play second with him in battle. Staying up tonight, as tired and as beaten as she feels – as they _both_ feel – it’s the least they can do.

He knows it’s what Archie would do for them.

“Okay,” Jughead concedes, sinking down onto one of the dining chairs. He watches with lowered eyes as she mimics his actions, claiming the seat opposite him just as she’d done at the hospital hours before.

“I don’t want to fight,” she tells him plainly.

“And you think I do?”

“I don’t know what you want.”

“A lot of things,” he finds himself saying before he remembers to stop himself. “But not that.”

She sighs before folding her hands, right over left, in front of both of them on the table. “It’s going to be a long night,” she says.

 _Long_ , he thinks, _in more ways than one._

Long in every sense of the word.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Coffee?”

She nods.

 

 

 


	3. Friday, Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thank you from the bottom of my heart to the lovely bugggghead for her fabulous beta-eyes!

  _Damn your love, damn your lies._

**_12:14 a.m._ **

**Friday - Day 2**

The rain taps steadily against his windowpane.

“So,” she starts, cupping her mug between her hands. “How’ve you been?”

“Swell.”

“Don’t be mean.”

That at least draws his attention up from whatever he’d been finding so interesting in his table’s woodgrain. “I wasn’t trying to be.”

 _Liar,_ she thinks.

“Do you like it here?”

“Sure,” he says. “I mean, it’s just a place. It has walls and a roof. It’s the size of a closet but it’s relatively cheap for Brooklyn.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I write book reviews for a website I bet you haven’t heard of,” he tells her.

“Try me.”

_“Title Page.”_

She hasn’t heard of it.

“What about your book?” she tries again.

“What about it?”

“What happened to it?”

“You’re looking at it,” he says, jerking his thumb towards a yellowing, coffee-stained stack of papers curling up at the edges on his desk. “The great American novel.”

“I’m sure it is,” she says sincerely.

He scoffs. “Please.”

“Do I get anything more than a syllable? Do you have an opinion about anything anymore?”

There’s a flash of something that crosses his face then, maybe anger, maybe that fire that she once knew brewed and burned beneath his heels and within his heart.

“I think that I hate this,” he says, and finally, _finally_ there’s something more than flatness curving around the edges of his voice. “I know I hate this.”

She thinks that a younger version of herself might’ve taken offense at the words he’s so carelessly throwing about now. The her of her youth might’ve tried to make this more about her own selfish self. Maybe she’d even try to make it about them. But she knows better now, and she knows full well he isn’t talking about her as much as he is the situation that has them suspended in the purgatory of this particular, hellish night.

“Can I shower?” she asks, tugging at the sweater clinging to her stomach. She might as well be productive since he’s not giving her much to go on. “I feel like I’m wearing death.”

She thinks he might chide her for her dramatics, but he doesn’t. What he does do is look at her instead with what she thinks might be sympathy, or at the very least, a kind, if not distant understanding.

It unnerves her a little because all he’s done since she’d taken her place across from him at Archie’s side is look at her with disdain, mixed with a side of contempt.

That is, _if_ he even so much as looked at her. The floor, the ceiling, his shoes, the potted plant sitting on top of the nurse’s station have all been better substitutes than her face.

“Bathroom’s over there,” he says, rising from his seat. “I’ll get you a towel.”

 

**_12:47 a.m._ **

He places a clean t-shirt on top of the towel he lays out for her in the bathroom, something plain and green and completely nondescript. No _S_ , no identifying marks, nothing that so much suggests that it might be his. She thinks about handing it back to him with a simple _‘thank you, but not necessary,’_ since she prepared for this – she’s brought a change of clothes. But after she steps out from under the stream of water she’d stood under for far too long holding her breath, after she crouches over her tote, rummaging through it in fruitless desperation, she reconsiders his silent offer.

She’s packed three bras for herself.

Three bras and no top to change into. And she can’t bring herself to put her sweater back on.

It smells like the hospital – like disinfectant, a little like bleach, and she has the sinking, knowing feeling that she’ll never be able to wash that out. It’s a shame, too, because she likes this sweater - it’s cashmere.

But she’ll always associate it with this day from here on out and she knows herself; she’ll never be able to wear it again comfortably.

 _This is the smell of death_ , she thinks. _This is the smell of the dying and the dead._

She pulls his shirt down over her head.

As she emerges from his bathroom, a trail of heavy steam licking and burning at her bare heels, she tells herself not to think too much about it – about death, about the shirt. About him.

“Thank you,” she says when she catches his gaze lingering over the tee. “I hung my towel out to dry, but I can move it if you’d rather me put it somewhere else.”

“That’s fine,” he says, and that’s all he does before he claims the shower himself.

 

**_1:03 a.m._ **

“Sorry about the soap,” she says when he sits back down across from her.

“What about it?”

“I used a lot of it.”

“Oh,” he says. She watches as the unkempt wisps of his hair across his forehead drip in uneven droplets down onto the table. “I didn’t notice.” Then quietly – “I used the rest.”

“Do you feel clean now?” she hears herself asking. It’s a strange question, she knows that, and maybe it borders the edge of a little too personal, but she wants to know.

She needs to know.

“No,” he responds. The invisible line of his breath creates a valley in his coffee.

“Me either.”

 

**_1:17 a.m._ **

There’s a single streak of lightning that bisects his window when it strikes, barbed and jagged at the edges. It fades so quickly that she wonders if she’d simply conjured it up in her mind, but when she turns to him her vision dots and blurs.

He’s carefully spinning his mug in circles with one finger crooked in the handle when she puts forth her next question.

“It doesn’t feel like ten years,” Betty says. “Does it?”

“I don’t know what it feels like.” There’s such blankness in his voice and she thinks that it may be one of the most unnerving, unnatural things of all to hear so much nothingness in the voice that had once been filled with so much passion. For the world he’d wanted to conquer, for the things he’d wanted to do, the tales he’d one day spin.

With the love he’d once had for her.

“I feel like I’ve done everything and nothing at all,” she muses.

He’s been so quiet that she jumps at his sudden, barking laugh that follows her dichotomy. There’s no mirth there, though, there’s no lightness.

“What?” she asks.

He shakes his head at her in the same incredulous way he used to. “That’s what I was thinking,” he says. “I didn’t know how to put it into words.”

“Oh,” she says. “Glad I could help, then.”

“Why are you here?” he asks.

She allows herself two full blinks before answering. “You invited me to-”

“No,” he corrects gently. “Not here, this apartment. Here, New York. Here with Archie.”

She’s unable to stop her defense and affront from manifesting itself, at least in part. “Why wouldn’t I be?” she counters. “This is Archie we’re talking about. Did you really not expect me to drop everything for him?”

It’s as much a question for herself as it is for him, but she’ll let him do the answering.

He shrugs, his right shoulder tipping up just slightly above his left. “I don’t know,” he says honestly. “I have no idea what your life is like anymore.”

“What could possibly stop me from coming here tonight?”

He does it again, that lopsided, frustrating shrug. “I don’t know. A job, a husband. Kids.” He smiles in passing, a smile she would’ve entirely missed had she not been studying him as closely as she had been. “Quintuplets.”

“God, do I look like I’ve had quintuplets?” She knows she’s wearing at least some of the elements of time on her body, but she hadn’t thought she looked like she’d brought five human beings into the world, either.

“No,” he tells her, bringing his eyes up to hers. “You look the same. You’re still beautiful, Betty.”

She hadn’t expected him to walk it back with words like those. And she knows that those must not have been easy words for him to say either. Even though she might think the same of him – that he still looks the same, too, that he still looks like the man she’d given so much of herself to – she can’t imagine those words coming out of her mouth now.

“I don’t have quintuplets,” she says. It’s the least she can offer him after what he’d offered her. “Or a husband.”

And just in case he’s doubting her at all – “Even if I did, there’s nothing and no one in this world that could’ve stopped me from being here tonight.”

  

**_1:20 a.m._ **

He speaks first this time.

“Do you think we still get to call ourselves that?”

“Call ourselves what?”

“His friends,” he says. “His _best_ friends.” She thinks he might not expect her to catch it, but she does – the change in his tone over the word _‘best,’_ the hard edge, the scoff he tacks onto it.

“Why wouldn’t we?” she asks.

She knows why. But maybe if he says it too, it’ll assuage her of the monumental, shattering sense of unease and wrong she feels now, even if only a little.

“I’ve been a shit friend.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” she says quietly, in an effort to convey some form of gentleness.

“I’ve been a shit friend,” he repeats.

She closes her eyes, falling back into black for the beat of a breath before pushing out her own sin. “You’re no worse than me.”

“No,” he counters. “I am. You have an excuse – you don’t live half a city away like I do. He didn’t put a roof over your head when you were a kid with nowhere to go, he didn’t make an effort all these years, just hoping you’d meet him halfway. He tried, Betty. So much more than I ever did,” Jughead says, and all she can see of him now is his head hung, the crown on his beanie he’d fixed back over his head pointing towards the ground.

It’s horrible and disconcerting to see any crown, especially his, fall so far from grace. It’s an unnatural position and one that begs to be rectified. So much of her wants to take his face between her hands and tip it back up; fix the crown, fix the king.

But even kings need to take responsibility for what’s theirs, for their actions and for their wrongs.

“We’ve been shit friends,” she agrees.

He exhales loudly, something that she can only describe as the sound of sorrow, of regret pinned under his breath. “Thank you,” he whispers over.

She’s about to ask him what for, but she thinks she knows.

_Thank you for letting me have this. Thank you for agreeing with me._

_Thank you for admitting it, too, so I’m not the only one facing the night wearing nothing but my guilt._

“Why were you such a bad friend?” she asks.

“What?”

“I have my reasons, as terrible as they may be. I was far away. I was busy, I had a deadline. I’d call him back later. What are yours?”

“Life,” he says. The half shrug is back, but it’s his left shoulder this time that rises above the other. “Embarrassment.”

“About what?”

He looks at her then, holding her gaze for what feels like entirely too long. He sees right through her when he does that, she thinks, through every façade she’s carefully constructed, through every well-placed word, through every falsity and half-truth.

“He invited me to his birthday party a couple years ago,” he tells her, voice heavy with memory. “Just a few friends, nothing major.”

“But when has that been true of Archie?” she muses. _Never_ , she answers for herself, that’s never been true of the kid who always had the biggest birthday party simply by virtue of everyone wanting to attend. That’s never been true of the kid who threw keggers that others from the next town over would show up to, bearing peace offerings of half-drunk liquor bottles stolen from their parents.

“I never ended up going,” he says. “But I should have.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He sucks in a deep breath at her question, monumental and shuddering, a breath that drops the equilibrium of air in the room entirely. “I didn’t have a job then,” he admits. “But maybe that isn’t all that surprising to you. I don’t know – I just didn’t want to deal with that. All the questions, Archie’s positivity. _‘You’ll find something soon, dude – I know you will. It’s all going to be okay’,_ ” he says in a half-baked imitation of Archie’s voice. “It was all just too much at the time. ”

She doesn’t miss the worm he’s dangled in front of her on the hook, and so much of her wants to call him out on it now. There’s so much of her that wants to tell him that regardless of what he thinks or feels about her, she’s always wanted him to succeed. She’s never doubted that he would, either, even in the face of any adversity he’d face – she thinks he has the passion and the drive to do anything he’d like to in this world.

But she doesn’t take the bait.

“And now?” she asks instead. “What is it now?”

“Now it feels like I didn’t do enough. I _know_ I didn’t do enough. I saw him a few months ago, at some mutual friend’s housewarming thing. I think I said hi and bye to him in the same sentence. I don’t know why I did that.”

She tips her head back in an effort to stretch out the sharp pull in her neck. It’s so heavy – her head, her wet hair still only halfway to drying, her thoughts – it’s all so heavy.

“The last time I saw him was in Riverdale,” Betty says, her voice heavy with embarrassment and shame that matches his. “I had lunch with him. _Lunch_ – like you’d have with someone you work with. Like you’d have with some kind of business associate.”

“Pop’s?” he asks.

That earns him a smile. They’re so far from where they started and she forgets sometimes that they’d begun in exactly the same place. He isn’t a perfect stranger sitting there in front of her, but rather, someone she’s loved and cherished before. In more ways than one.

“Pop’s,” she confirms. What comes next comes quietly because even now and years after the fact, she’s still so ashamed. She still can’t quite believe she’d done this. “The glass was still half full.”

He matches her quietness with gentleness. “Meaning?”

“I had to leave before Archie even finished his milkshake,” Betty says. “I didn’t even give him the time to do that. I had a flight. I was covering some Congressional campaign at the time. I don’t even remember where I was going. D.C., I guess. But it just doesn’t seem like a good enough reason now.”

“How many years?” Jughead asks. “Since you’ve seen him?”

She wants to lie.

She wants so badly to lie.

But there’s absolutely no point for her to. She’ll know the number, she’ll still know the truth and have to live with it, even if he doesn’t.

“Three,” she says.

“It’s not as bad as us.”

She lets herself linger over the word – _us_. It’s been a while since she’s been in an ‘us’ of any kind, and an even longer while since she’s been an ‘us’ with him.

“No,” she agrees. “It’s not as bad as us. But we had an excuse. A better one, at least, than all the crap I came up with.”

He shrugs, but his deflection fails to land with her. “We have the rest of his life to make it right,” he says.

She doesn’t need to look over at him to know he’s thinking the thought she can’t quite shake, that she hasn’t been able to since the phone call.

_How much longer will that life last?_

  

**_1:37 a.m._ **

“You hungry?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“I have crackers,” he says, looking over his shoulder at the bare kitchen counters. “I think I might have a bagel in the freezer, too.”

“Thank you,” she offers as politely as she can. “But I can’t eat. You should, though, if you want to.”

“I don’t.”

“Oh.”

“I need more coffee,” he announces, scrubbing a hand down over his face. “Do you want some?”

He’s up with both their mugs in his hands before she even has the chance to nod in return.

He’s always been good at reading her.

 

**_2:01 a.m._ **

The rain continues.

It’s like a game now – who can hold out longer than the other, who can’t stand the silence more than the other.

She doesn’t lose at much; she’s always been competitive, to a fault even.

But she keeps losing at this.

“You live alone,” she starts, giving the studio an obvious once-over for emphasis. “You’re not married?”

“Clearly not.”

She’d expected that answer. He barely fits into this apartment as it is. It’s overflowing at the seams with papers stacked high on the desk and books piled onto the floor – there’s no room for anyone else here – but that hadn’t really been the reason why she’d asked the question.

“Are you seeing anyone?”

_That’d been the reason._

He’s back to staring at the woodgrain when he answers. “No.” Then – “are you?”

“I was engaged.”

“Congratulations.”

“Was.”

“Oh. Sorry, then.”

“Are you?” she asks, but quietly and under her breath.

She doesn’t think he is. She can’t explain it, but she knows he’s not sorry in the slightest. If she knows him, if there’s any shred of the man that she once knew still in there, he’s probably sorry she’s had to go through a world of pain at the flaming wreck that was the dissolution of her engagement. He’s probably sorry that she’d had to suffer through the inevitable embarrassment that came from fielding the same inane, frustrating question, the one that always went something like _‘oh you poor, poor dear, what happened? Did he cheat?’_ He’s probably sorry about all that.

But he’s not sorry that she’s not engaged right now.

  

**_2:18 a.m._ **

“I saw you once about two years later,” he says. “I think.”

“You think?”

“It was back in Riverdale, just after Christmas. You were in your mom’s car. I didn’t actually see you, I just saw the back of your head. You had the ponytail up so I assumed it was you, but it could’ve just as easily been Polly.”

“Was it raining that day?”

“Yeah.”

“It was me,” she says softly. “My mom was driving me to the airport.”

“Back to school?”

She nods.

 

**_2:19 a.m._ **

“It’s still ten years since we’ve seen each other,” she clarifies. “It’s not eight, it’s still ten. For all intents and purposes.”

Ten years for the things that matter, anyhow – ten years since they’ve talked, ten years since she’d looked at him and he looked at her.

“It’s not like it matters,” he says, shrugging.

 _He’s right,_ she concedes. It doesn’t.

 

**_2:22 a.m._ **

“Where were you last Christmas?”

“Excuse me?”

“You said to Archie earlier that you didn’t go home last Christmas but that he knew why. Why didn’t you go home?”

Betty considers lying to him, but she decides against it. He could find out the truth if he really wanted to and with minimal effort involved, too. It’s not like it’s a big secret. Not anymore, at least.

She shrugs before her answer in an effort to impose any semblance of blasé that she can. “I had a fight with my mom,” she says. “I didn’t think she wanted me home so I didn’t go.”

“Why?” he asks. “What happened?”

Betty wonders how they can speak so frankly with each other now and why there isn’t anything in her keeping her from being completely honest with him. She doesn’t know exactly when in the night that wall of single words and averted eyes had toppled and come crumbling down to the ground, but she knows now that it has.

“I didn’t want to get married,” she tells him. “She wanted me to. You can imagine how that went.”

He nods then, slowly in understanding. “You never did see eye to eye with your mother,” he says. “Did she ever come around?”

“It’s a work in progress.”

“What happened?” he asks. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

It’s the first time since walking into his shoebox of an apartment that either one of them has even broached the idea of boundaries or of withholding information from the other. It’s strange – she’s usually a private person, maybe even to a fault. Her life is her own, and her personal relationships, her secrets and her lies are for her and only her to know.

But tonight she thinks that she wouldn’t mind sharing. She wouldn’t mind sharing this with him.

“I didn’t love him,” she says eventually. That’s putting it nicely and far too neatly in a pretty pink bow, but she figures it’s as good an answer as any.

“At all? Then why were you engaged to him?”

“I did love him. But just not enough to marry him.”

“Is there a metric for that?” he asks. “For how much you need to love someone before you marry him or her?”

_Wouldn’t she like to know?_

Betty shrugs, linking her forefinger around the mug’s handle. “All I know is that whatever I felt wasn’t enough. But if you ever find a better answer than that, I’m all ears,” she says; it’s a mistake she wouldn’t mind not making again if she can help it.

He sips slowly, twice, before venturing his next question. “Was it that guy?” he asks. “Aaron? Andrew?”

“Who?”

“From college. Baseball hat guy,” he clarifies.

_“Adam?”_

“Yeah.”

“No,” she says slowly. Adam – she hasn’t thought about him in years. She wonders what he’s up to now and where in the world he might possibly be. He’d always wanted to travel she remembers, and somewhere in the back of her mind, she hopes he’s gotten the opportunity to. He’d been a good boyfriend, understanding to a fault and far too kind to her when she hadn’t at all deserved it, but still – she hasn’t thought about him in years.

“That ended ages ago,” she says. “What made you think it’d be him?”

He shrugs then, circling his arms back around his coffee cup protectively. A shield for his coffee, a shield against her.

“Shot in the dark,” he says. “He’s the one that came after me.”

 

**_2:31 a.m._ **

“I thought you’d be married,” she admits. “Or at least well on the way to it.”

She’s flying dangerously close to territory that they’ve in some way and somehow both designated as a no-man’s land that neither can enter, and she has the sinking feeling that they’ll soon crash right into it.

And, she thinks, that she might be the guilty pilot.

“Did you not want to?” she continues.

“I’m not unmarried because of lack of wanting, Betty.”

“So you do still want to get married, then?”

She doesn’t catch her slip of tongue until after his eyes flick up to hers, first wide in shock then pulled back down in confusion. Any other night, any other time and she might’ve matched his shocked expression, but she can’t bring herself to right now. There’s worse embarrassment to be felt than this and there are bigger words that need to be said.

“Not to me, obviously,” she corrects. “Just in a hypothetical future.”

“Is it that obvious?”

Her heart hadn’t caught at her mistake before, but it catches at his question now.

Maybe he’ll be the pilot after all.

“You tell me,” she asks. She doesn’t expect him to but it’s no reason for her not to try.

“I was talking to Fred Andrews earlier when you were getting coffee. When you were down in the cafeteria and pissed at-”

“I wasn’t pissed at-”

“When you were pissed at me,” he interrupts firmly. “And you had every right to be – I was being a dick.”

Her half-open mouth already forming around the syllables of words she hasn’t yet decided on snaps shut at his admission.

“I used to think that love was a finite thing. Or at the very least, that it was a definitive thing. It starts somewhere and it concludes somewhere. It begins and it ends, and that’s the end of that.”

“Is that not what love is?”

“Not according to Fred Andrews.”

“What is love according to Fred Andrews, then?”

“Something that remains,” he says, weaving his words so seamlessly into the tail end of her question. “It’s something that changes with time, but it’s not something that disappears.”

She turns her line of sight from him down to the same woodgrain he’d found so utterly fascinating earlier. “Do you think he’s right?”

“I thought it was complete bullshit a few hours ago,” he says. “But friendship endures - if it didn’t, you and I wouldn’t be sitting here for Archie right now. Is love all that different?”

“I don’t know,” she ventures, and truly, she doesn’t.

“He says he still loves Archie’s mom.”

“Mr. Andrews?”

He nods at her, the curl of his that never used to stay put falling in front of his eyes as he does.

“That’s sad,” Betty whispers, tugging at a scab of broken nail on her finger. She winces when she flicks off a corner and starts feeling the uncomfortable sting against her skin that signals the cut hadn’t been fully healed yet, but she holds her breath and pulls it off with one quick pinch.

 _I would’ve done it sooner or later_.

“It isn’t,” he says, placing both hands flat against the table as he rises from his seat.

“Where are you go-”

“It isn’t that sad,” Jughead calls back. “If they hadn’t gotten divorced, Mary Andrews would never have moved to Chicago. She would never had the career she has now, she never would’ve remarried. She’s happy. Fred is, too. It’s not that sad and it’s not that tragic. Here.”

She catches the slip of paper he slides across to her moments before it flutters off the table – a Band-Aid, she realizes as she examines the bolded lettering.

“For your finger,” he explains.

“What?”

“You’re bleeding.”

She looks down at scab she’d been picking at and stares at the perfectly rounded bubble of red balancing on her skin.

So she is.

“I hate when it’s on the knuckle,” she says and not even to him in particular as she fumbles with the wrapper. “It always ends up wrinkling it.”

He stands up again without ceremony, loudly knocking his chair against the floorboards as he does. Betty jumps at the noise.

“Don’t put it on yet,” Jughead instructs her over his shoulder. With a pair of kitchen scissors pointed towards himself, he sits back down, pulling his chair back closer to the table with a foot hooked under one of its legs. “I’m surprised you don’t know this trick.”

She watches in quiet fascination as he slides the Band-Aid back over to his side of the table and holds it between his pointer and middle fingers as he cuts once into either end.

Then, he motions for her hand with his.

“What’re you doing?” she mumbles as he turns her hand up to face him, her breath hitching as his fingers circle her wrist. She doesn’t need an answer; she knows exactly what he’s doing. But she needs to say something – _anything_ – to take at least some of the weight off of this moment.

He doesn’t respond as he wraps the two thin ribbons he’d cut around either side of her bleeding knuckle.

It’s nothing short of strange feeling - his hand on hers again, his skin on her skin. The pads of his fingers are rough, like he hasn’t so much as touched or even sniffed in the direction of moisturizer in a decade, although if his bare bones bathroom and its two in one shampoo-conditioner combo are any indication, he likely hasn’t.

But there’s still a gentleness to the way he holds her hand in his, even if only for this moment as he covers up her cut. It feels almost familiar.

“Thank you,” she says.

“It’s nothing.”

She’s not sure that he’s right.

  

**_2:37 a.m._ **

“You know, it isn’t that obvious,” he says.

“What isn’t?”

“That it wouldn’t have been you. That in a hypothetical future, I wouldn’t have married you. I thought I would have once.”

He looks at her folded hands as he speaks, at the way her left rests on top of the right, and it’s only then that she really hears what he’s saying

It’s only then that she really understands the importance of his flatly spoken words.

That flimsy band aid that he’d wrapped around her finger, the one that she’ll throw away and replace with something fresh and brand-new tomorrow, might’ve once been home to something else he’d meant to give her – something solid, something sturdy, something real.

Something meant to last.

 

**_3:02 a.m._ **

The rain falls harder. It pelts loudly against his thin windowpane, and in hindsight, she should’ve seen it coming. The perfect storm, in all its ugliness.

It happens quickly.

There’s a flash of lightning first followed by the blaze of groaning, angry thunder.

Then, there’s pitch black.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he says when the lights snap off without warning.

She waits before offering up her response because in her experience, sometimes the lights do come back on if only they’re given the chance.

These ones, though, don’t.

“No one is fucking kidding you.”

It’s definitely not the right thing for her to say but it’s what comes naturally. It’s what she _feels_ like saying, and in the cover of the darkness, it’s easier for her to reach that zenith of unbridled naturalness.

The high that comes from using a word she knows she shouldn’t evaporates when he pushes his chair back from the table. Without the visual warning, Betty jumps again at the sound of the scraping floorboards.

“What are you doing?” she asks. In the darkness that her eyes haven’t quite adjusted to yet, she can just barely see him moving towards the sorry excuse of a kitchen and feeling his way up the wall for the fuse box.

“I’m trying to fix this – what does it look like?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she retaliates, moving towards the window instead of him. _Stop engaging._ “I can’t see.”

That does the trick – he stays silent.

 

**_3:03 a.m._ **

“The whole block’s out,” she reports over her shoulder. “I don’t think whatever you’re doing there is going to fix anything.”

“You don’t actually know that the whole block’s out. It’s three a.m. – normal people are sleeping at this hour, even in this city. Normal people are sleeping with the lights off.”

“I know how normal people sleep,” she snaps back. But because that’d come off a little harsher than she’d intended, and because she doesn’t want to start anything with him, she backtracks. “Do you need help?”

“Yeah,” he says, holding out his phone to her and pointing its flashlight down to the ground. “Can you hold this? I need both hands.”

She obliges, taking the phone from him with more force than necessary.

 _Normal people._ What a completely dickish comment to make.

“Where am I pointing this thing?” she asks, inadvertently bumping into him when she misjudges the distance.

“At the box.”

“Right, but where at the-”

“-where my hands are and-”

“-can’t see where your hands are, they’re blocking-”

“- _here_ , and not– _Jesus_ , not at my eyes!”

“Sorry! God! What the hell is wrong with you?”

 _“_ What’s wrong with _me?_ I’m the one temporarily blinded by your-”

“-you’re fine one minute and the next you’re acting like such a massive-”

“-to do a simple thing, point the _goddamn light_ at the _goddamn box_ -”

“-thought you’d put whatever _shit_ _attitude_ you’ve been carrying with you behind-”

“-not the one with a shit attitude here-”

“-don’t know why I thought we’d been getting somewhere-”

“-not my fault that I reacted when I was nearly blinded by your-”

“- _nearly blinded?_ I don’t think I’ve _ever_ in my _entire life_ heard something so blown out of-”

“-not exaggeration if it’s true. I can barely see any-”

“-can’t see because there’s nothing to – _Cricket,”_ she blurts out when the name flashes across the screen.

A new text message.

A new text message at three in the morning.

“Give me that-”

“Who the hell is Cricket, and what the hell kind of name is that?”

He has the phone from her hands to his in one swift snatch. “That’s my business.”

“Someone named _Cricket_ is your business,” she repeats flatly.

“Stop.”

“Is that a pet name or an actual name?”  

“I said stop.”

“If it’s a pet name, it’s absolutely heinous,” she continues _. Now she’s just being mean._

“Seriously, maybe you should rethink-”

“Betty, I swear to god-”

“What?” she challenges. “You swear to god _what_ , Jughead?” She’s on fire, pushing every boundary known to mankind and she knows it has everything to do with Cricket. Goddamned Cricket. Cricket with the awful, terrible name, Cricket who’s probably looking to get him into her bed right now, or to finagle her way into his.

Cricket who she has absolutely no right to judge or even know about. Cricket who is now a part of his life in a way that she isn’t.

“Forget it,” he says, moving over to the couch and claiming the end furthest from her. “I don’t want to get into this with you.”

But maybe now, she does.

 

**_3:07 a.m._ **

“I thought you weren’t seeing anyone.”

“I’m not.”

_So he’s just sleeping with her then._

“Jughead and Cricket,” she mocks. She sounds so snide and so incredibly unlike herself. “I can’t wait for those wedding invitations.”

“Will you just stop?”

 _No,_ she thinks. _I don’t want to._

“It’s like marriage by Mother Goose.”

“I’m not listening to this anymore.”

She keeps quiet.

He stays where he is.

****

**_3:13 a.m._ **

After thinking about it for exactly six minutes and weighing the pros and cons in her head, she relents and moves to the opposite end of the couch.

She’s not about to apologize to him – she doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean.

But, she muses, maybe this is the in between.

 

**_3:25 a.m._ **

“You’re so angry at me,” she says.

“That’s rich coming from you. What did you _just_ say to me? _Marriage by Mother Goose? Can’t wait for those wedding invitations?”_

“You started it.” If that isn’t the most completely and utterly childish thing she could’ve said.

_“How?”_

“I was just trying to help and you were being incredibly rude.”

“Again, _wedding invitations._ ”

“I was joking!”

“Sure you were.”

“What did I do to you?” she asks. It’s so much easier for her to when she can’t see him reacting right in front of her, eyes deliberately cast somewhere else, face contorted in a scoff. “You’re _so_ angry at me. You’ve been so angry at me since I got here. I mean, you can barely look at me. What did I do to you?”

“Nothing,” he says. His voice is back to monotone again. It’s perfectly flat again, like the grey mirror of still water looking back at her on a moonless night – no ripples, no waves – nothing. “You didn’t do anything, Betty.”

“No, seriously – I must have done something,” she argues. “You’re picking fights with me every chance you get.”

“I’m not-”

“Yes, you are! Like at the hospital earlier, before I pulled you out of the room. You said that _‘I was good at that.’_ What did you even mean?”

“Nothing,” he repeats.

“What am I good at?” she presses. “I want to know.”

His voice is sharp when it returns. “I don’t want to talk about this. Honestly, I don’t want to talk, period.”

She matches his bite with her own. “Well, _I_ want to talk. And I honestly want to know. What am I good at, Jughead? I deserve to know.”

“I’m not getting into-”

“I mean, it obviously meant enough to you that you made a big deal out of it at the hospital, that you had to embarrass me in front of freaking Fred and Mary And-”

 _“You’re good at leaving!”_ he snaps. “Okay? You’re goddamn amazing at leaving.”

 

**_3:37 a.m._ **

“Why did we break up?”

“Why are we still talking about-”

 _“Why.”_ It’s not a question so much as it is a command.

“Distance,” he responds eventually. Even through the dark she can see him comb his hand through his hair. He’d done that before, way back when in moments of stress and anger. She can’t say for sure, but she thinks that still stands true.

“That’s it?”

“Was that not it?”

“You tell me,” she says. “I was the one on the receiving end of all that magnificent breaking up you felt was so necessary.”

“Then, distance,” he repeats back to her.

“Of the geographical variety or-”

“Of the everything variety. You and I – we didn’t want the same things,” he says.

“That’s funny,” she snaps back. “The thing I’d wanted was you. I hadn’t realized you didn’t feel the same. Good to know.”

“That’s not what I– you know that’s not what I meant.”

“I don’t, actually. That was never made clear to me.”

He sighs as the outline of him tugs his beanie off and tosses it towards the coffee table. “Your life and mine went in different directions. There isn’t that much more to it than that.”

 

**_3:39 a.m._ **

“What a fucking cop out of a reason.” She doesn’t normally swear unless the occasion calls for it and right now, she absolutely feels like it does.

Different directions.

Distance.

_Bullshit._

“It may be,” he mutters. “But I don’t have to justify any of it to you.”

 

**_3:42 a.m._ **

“You’re good at staying.”

“What?”

“You’re good at staying,” she repeats. “You don’t just get to say that about me without taking responsibility yourself. You don’t get to paint yourself as some kind of martyr. You don’t get to hold that against me. So – you’re good at staying.”

“I never said that I-”

“You were supposed to come, too,” she interrupts. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she recognizes that this is a useless conversation they’re having ten years too late. But they’ve talked about everything else, she’s said everything else she’s wanted to, and this is all that remains.

What hadn’t been said a decade ago.

“I wasn’t supposed to be the only one that left. Wasn’t that the plan all along? Wasn’t that _our_ plan?” she continues.

“That was your plan _for me.”_

 _“‘One year, Betty,’_ _”_ she recounts, voice high and affected as she mimics and mocks. “ _‘Just one year and I’ll transfer, and if I don’t, I’ll find a way to make it work. Just one year and we’ll be together again, I promise_. Don’t rewrite history, Jughead – it was your plan as much as it was mine.”

“Your school, those people, that life? That wasn’t me, Betty! That life wasn’t _for me.”_

“So your genius solution was to just end it? What, because you didn’t like a frat party you went to? Because sitting out on a quad was just far too _mainstream_ for you?”

“I didn’t know what else to-”

“You don’t get to tell me that I’m good at leaving when it’d been your choice to stay!” she says, and somewhere in her tirade she finds herself somehow on her feet and yelling down at the fuzzy, indistinguishable shadow of him. “You don’t get to walk around with a scarlet letter pinned on your shoulder when you could’ve-”

He jumps up too, then, like a monster wading through the night. “If anyone should be wearing the scarlet letter, it’s you.”

She stops.

She hadn’t been moving all that much to begin with but what had been – her pitiful hand gestures, her thoughts, her heavy, heaving breathing – it all stops.

In the stillness, she hears him breathe with just as much fracture and staccato as had plagued her own breaths.

Outside, the thunder rolls again, the deepest of groans pushing out from the center of the skies.

It’s angry. But it isn’t as angry as she is.

“How dare you.”

He doesn’t respond, and all she can think is _finally_. Finally, she’s as angry as he is. Finally, she has a reason to snap.

Finally, she has as much distaste in her mouth for him as he seems to have for her.

“You heard me.”

“How _dare_ you,” she repeats.

He meets her flame with an entire forest fire. “What was his name again? _Adam?”_ Jughead says. There’s so much hate in the way he’s talking to her now, so, so much hate that he bites into each and every letter of his words. She wonders how that voice filled with nothing but the most violent contempt for her could’ve once told her that it’d loved her, more than anything, and as tenderly as any voice could have.

“You moved on to him ridiculously quickly after we broke up-”

“-that you would even think about insinuating-”

“-on to him in record time, really. I mean, did you-”

“-I wasn’t the one who even entertained the idea of ending-”

“- _only thing_ I could do given-”

“-still loved you. I still cared about you. I still-”

“-just because I broke up with you doesn’t mean that I didn’t still feel-”

“- _you broke it!_ Everything that we had between us – twenty entire years of friendship, of me loving you – _you broke it!”_

_“Because I had to!”_

She breaks.

She doesn’t know what exactly it is in those four words of his that does the trick – maybe the way he’d shouted them back at her, maybe the deep-seated understanding settling in that he’d felt so at a dead-end that he’d had no choice but to dead-end them.

But they break her.

She breaks because she’d been just fine not knowing any of this and she’s regretting so much learning all of it now. She breaks because this – them – seems like such a stupid, selfish thing to be discussing; they’re battling each other over these nonsense words and nonsense feelings that begun and ended so long ago while Archie is just battling for his life. She breaks because the fact that she does feel something right now, whatever it is, probably does mean something.

She breaks because she’s out of words to say to him and this is all that’s left. Anger. Feeling.

Fire.

She picks up the object closest to her on the coffee table, a remote judging by the feel of it, and flings it towards his wall with as much force as she can drum up. It cracks, shrieking and sharp over the bellow of the rain before descending to the ground. Over the floorboards, she can make out the shattered remains of the broken plastic casting dark shadows, looming and long, and sharp around the edges.

Maybe she’ll offer to replace it for him later. But right now, she doesn’t give two shits about his remote.

She doesn’t give two shits about him.

She doesn’t want to look at him. She can barely see him, but she doesn’t even want to look at the outline of him.

This isn’t her house, but she doesn’t care.

She barricades herself in his bathroom and slams the door as loudly as she can.

 

**_4:04 a.m._ **

The rain rarely scares her.

Before yesterday, before tonight, she’d loved it.

But now, she hates what it’s done to Archie.

She hates how loud it is now. She can’t remember the last time she’s been subject to rain like this.

Heavy doesn’t do it justice. It comes at down violently and brutally, pelting at the little bathroom window with such force that it rattles and shakes it, a rumbling, angry rhythm to match the rolling thunder. _It could break,_ she thinks. If it keeps coming down like this, there’s a very good chance of that happening; none of his windows are in any way steady or strong.

They could all break.

It’s loud – too loud. The thunder, the gunfire drumming of rain hitting her at all angles, the sound of him breathing heavily on the edge of the bed – it’s all much too much.

She holds her breath as she pulls the door open and tiptoes back outside. She’s furious with him, but at least if she sits with him, she won’t be alone.

Underneath her bare feet, the floorboards creak.

 

**_4:24 a.m._ **

She clears her throat, hacking loudly into the silence.

She doesn’t particularly care one way or the other if he’s awake, but she wants to know all the same.

He doesn’t respond.

 

**_4:49 a.m._ **

He’s lying down now with his legs dangling off the edge of his bed. She can just barely make out the steady rise and fall of his chest.

“Jughead,” she calls quietly and when he doesn’t respond, she tries again. “Jughead.”

Still nothing.

“Jug.”

It’s been years since that particular incarnation of his name has fallen from her lips. She’s used the word before in its inanimate sense, and plenty of times at that, too, but never in reference to him. It had always been the full, formal Jughead the handful of times she’d spoken his name, sometimes in passing, sometimes in memory.

But she’d never used Jug.

There’s a beat, one that’s exactly three breaths long, then plainly – “What?”

“Were you sleeping?”

“No.”

She doesn’t know why she says what she does because it’s self-explanatory. She’d been the one asking him the question. But in this moment, even when they’re so far apart in a studio the size of a shoebox, even when she’s so grateful for the night hiding his face from her now because she can’t stand to look at him while she’s this angry, she still feels the need to tell him.

“I wasn’t either,” she whispers back.

 

**_5:09 a.m._ **

With wailing cries and painful breaths, the rain crescendos its way to the height of its violent tantrum.

“I know you didn’t cheat.”

She forces herself to take a breath; a second, a third. If she doesn’t, she’ll say whatever flies into her head first, and even though there’s no part of her that wants to, she’s always been taught to at least _try_ to be kind.

“You didn’t know that an hour ago,” Betty says eventually.

“I did.” _Flat, flat, flat._ His voice is so flat. Toneless and emotionless, like he’s never cared about a thing before.

Like he’s never loved before.

“I was angry,” Jughead continues. “But I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

“Why do you think we’re so angry?” she asks.

“We’re worried about Archie.”

“That’s not it.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“No,” she corrects. “Of course we’re worried about Archie. But that’s not why you and I are doing this right now.”

“Maybe not,” he agrees. There’s a long, dense pause, thick like molasses and slow like rain-drenched fog playing outside his window. “Maybe Fred Andrews is right. Maybe there are parts of love that remain.”

She feels her heart stop in a way she hopes Archie’s own across town doesn’t. “What?” she murmurs back.

_What is he saying?_

_What is he implying?_

“Maybe you carry what you haven’t let go with you. All the anger, all the affection, all the hate, everything that you still have with you at the end of love – maybe that never leaves you. Maybe what Fred Andrews meant was that you carry what remains of love with you until you can do something about it.”

“Do you think we’re doing something about it right now?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says slowly. “Maybe.”

 

**_5:13 a.m._ **

She looks down at the shadow of a ring on her finger.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she starts. “But it’s probably a good thing that you and I never got married.”

“You think?”

She ignores his scoff and forges ahead. “If you and I really did want different things, if our lives really did go in such divergent directions then, yes. Two people like that should never get married. They shouldn’t be together. We would’ve made each other miserable. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not definitely either. But I think we would’ve.”

“I’m glad you agree.”

“What was it?” she asks.

“What was what?”

“The thing that set you off,” she says. “The thing that made you realize that we didn’t want the same things anymore.”

_Because I never saw whatever it was, and I’d like to know._

Could breaths sound thoughtful, she thinks his now would be the definition. “It wasn’t just one thing,” he tells her. “I wouldn’t have done what I did if it were just a singular thing – I loved you too much for-” he trails off then, abruptly and curtly – she knows he hadn’t meant to reveal that much.

“Betty, it wasn’t just about the frat parties and the quads,” he says. “I wanted that for you – to go to college, to grow, to just be you, away from your mother. Away from Riverdale.”

“But?” she asks.

“But the you that you became and the me that I was... we were too different. That life you had in Chicago, the people you met there – that was the right life for you. And you fit in there, Betty. You were made for that world.”

She knows what he’s about to say because even back then, she’d thought it. She’d ignored it and brushed it aside because in the name of love, it hadn’t mattered to her.

But she’d thought it, too.

“I never was.”

“Jug-”

“We were so young,” he says. “I wish stupidity and idiotic dreaming didn’t go hand in hand with that, but it did. It does. I wish I could’ve hurt you less. But how could the guy who went to community college while working the night shift at Pop’s ever have afforded a school like yours? How could I stand up to every single person there who could offer you so much more than I could? How could I measure up at a place like that?”

“You could’ve – _we_ could’ve-”

“More than that,” he interrupts. “That’s not who I wanted to become. I never wanted to be a part of that world, Betty. I loved _you_. I wanted _you_. But I didn’t want that world. And I didn’t want to become someone who fit into that world either. That wasn’t me. It still isn’t me.”

“What world?” she scoffs back. “I just – I don’t understand.”

“The world with the polo wearing masses, and trust funds, and frat parties-”

“If you say frat parties one more time,” she warns. “You’re making it sound like that’s all I did. That it’s all _we_ would’ve done if you’d just stuck to the plan. We went to _one_ frat party, _one_ time, and-”

“It was more than just that. Don’t you get it? I didn’t want that for myself, Betty!” he counters. “It was easy to ignore all that in Riverdale. When it was just you and me with the rest of the world somewhere else over the rainbow. But I couldn’t ignore that forever. I loved you, but I didn’t want to live an entire life where I constantly felt like I never fit in. I didn’t want to live a life constantly on the outside.”

“You fit in with _me!_ I loved you! Why wasn’t that enough?”

 _“You_ were always enough,” he tells her gently. “But it wasn’t just that you wanted me there with you – it was that you wanted me to fit in there, too. At that place and with those people. You wanted that life for me. You know you did.”

“Because I wanted better for you!”

“I know,” he says. “You always have – you’ve always wanted the best for me. You’ve always wanted me to be better. And you deserved that better version of me, too. But I just – I could never give you that without losing myself in the process. I’d feel lost in my own skin if I did.” He sighs then, wrapping both his hands around the back of his neck as he does. “Betty, no matter which way you spin it, I just wasn’t enough for you.”

 

**_5:18 a.m._ **

The longer she sits with his explanation, the angrier she gets.

She knows he’d been trying to do the right thing by her. That’s always the way he’d been – he loved her by trying to be the best for her and by wanting the best for her.

It’s kind. It’s honorable and noble.

In theory.

In reality, it makes her absolutely furious.

“What about me?” she asks lowly.

“What about you?”

“I, I, I. That whole sad little speech just now – I, I, I. What about me? What about what _I_ wanted? What about how _I_ felt?”

“Betty-”

 _“No!_ You don’t get to talk right now!” Somewhere in her anger she’s gotten herself onto her feet. “You didn’t think that I deserved to know all of this back then? That after all we went through, after twenty years of knowing each other all I get is a phone call and a _‘it’s not working out, Betts, but have a nice life?’”_

 _“Hey!”_ He seems taller than she remembers him being, she thinks, when he jumps to his feet, too. “That’s not what I said to you.”

“It might as well have been! No explanation! No anything – just an _‘it’s not working out.’_ How dare you?” she asks. “After everything we’ve been through – how could you have done that? Didn’t you care about me at all?”

“Of course I did! I loved-”

“If you really loved me, if you really cared about me, you wouldn’t have done that. I mean, what _do_ you care about anymore?” she asks. “There doesn’t seem to be much!”

“I care about a lot of things!”

“Well, it doesn’t _sound_ like you do! The only thing you’ve given half a crap about this entire night is Archie. No, you know what? That’s not true,” she corrects, bringing her finger up and jabbing it at his face. “You’ve been _more_ than invested in pissing me off tonight. You’ve given a _huge_ , monumental crap about being the most irritating, annoying, _unpleasant_ shell of a person you once were. But other than that, you’re just-”

“I’m just what?” Jughead snaps back. “I’m just what, Betty? Since you think you know me _so_ well, why don’t you tell me _exactly_ what I am?”

“What about life?” she asks. “What about love? What about your writing – all the things you used to care about?”

_What about me?_

“I don’t need to explain any part of my life to you.”

“Of course you don’t,” she sneers. “Just like you don’t need to think about anyone else but you. Just like you don’t need to feel sorry for anyone else but you.”

He breaks then, the steady, toneless timbre of his voice rising to an all-out roaring shout. “What do you want, Betty?” he asks. “What do you want from me?”

A scream for a shout.

_“I want you to feel something!”_

_“Why?”_

They’re still covered and draped over in darkness, but she doesn’t need the light to see how heavily the outline of him is breathing. He’s standing so close to her, so close that she can feel the heat from his breath mix with hers.

She can taste their mingled anger; there’s a sweet, burning tang of deliciousness in it.

“Because,” she whispers under the echo of their earlier words that still ring and hang over them. “If you do, then I just might, too.”

_I might finally feel something, too._

No light and no dark could’ve prepared her for what comes next. No day or no night, no storm or calm.

He kisses her.

He kisses her with a blinding, overwhelming kind of power, one that has her neck cracking back sharply even as she holds her head steady to meet his.

He kisses her with the fight and fire they’d been hurling back and forth at each other; she knows because the burn is already there on her lips, blistering and stinging.

He kisses her with the strength of the storm raging outside his window, and when he does, she feels all the tempest and tumult lying within his heart for her pour out into her own mouth.

  

**_5:21 a.m._ **

He pulls away from her just as suddenly as he’d approached her, detaching her hands that have snaked their way and gripped onto his shoulders. It happens so quickly that she doesn’t realize he isn’t there wrapped around her until he’s taken a full step back from her and the cold air from his movements jolt her out of her haze.

“Sorry,” he mutters. “I shouldn’t have.”

“No,” she agrees quietly, fingers still pressed against her bottom lip. _Had he just bitten her?_ “You shouldn’t.”

But it’s a little too late for the should haves and the would haves, the could haves.

It’s far, far too late for that.

She crosses the distance just as quickly as he’d created it, and like the way the rain swirls and builds without thinking but only feeling, she crashes into him with all the energy she has left in her and returns the kiss she hadn’t wanted him to end.

  

**_5:22 a.m._ **

They’re a tangle of arms and legs as she wrestles him for control, as she tries to turn him and as he tries to turn her. He’s edging out ahead when they hit the foot of the bed, and the sudden halt of the force they’d been spinning with sends her tumbling down onto the sheets ungracefully in a flail of kicking, slipping legs.

 _I shouldn’t do this,_ she thinks as he covers her body with hers. _We shouldn’t do this._

_We shouldn’t do this, we shouldn’t do this._

“What do you want?” he asks her, breathing out the words straight into her ear; they’re not even for the world itself to hear, only her.

_But I want to._

“I don’t know.”

“Betty,” he says again, pulling away and balancing delicately on his forearms. “Do you want me to stop?”

“No,” she manages to mumble out. She’s so tired. She’s so cold.

She’s so hot.

“I want you to fuck me.”

 

**_5:23 a.m._ **

_Fuck me._

Those two words feel foreign on her tongue, and insurmountably so when directed at him. In her life, she doesn’t even know that she’s ever said those words before, strung together like that.

She can still hear the other words she’d once said to him, repeated so many times in a life they’d lived so long ago.

_Love me, love me._

_Love me._

But these words – these harsh, sharp, dirty words – she knows she’s never said these to him before.

But they’re the right words. She isn’t looking for love right now or any tenderness, either. She isn’t looking for the kind of meaningful, intimate sex like they used to have.

She’s never paid much mind to the word before. It isn’t one that regularly enters her vernacular; her mother has done a fine job of extracting that word right out of her vocabulary. _‘It’s unladylike, Elizabeth, it’s uncouth.’_

It’s this, it’s that.

But it’s the single and only word that’s right for what she wants right now.

 _And that’s a beautiful thing,_ she thinks, even in the face of such an ugly, heavy word, that there nevertheless does exist a word for exactly what she wants.

Whatever that may be.

 

**_5:27 a.m._ **

She knows what fucking is.

She’s been fucked before. Which is how she knows that whatever they’re doing now isn’t fucking.

This isn’t what they’d done at sixteen or eighteen or twenty. There’d been a closeness back then in the way they’d have sex, a closeness that made her think once, _yes_ – _I understand why the poets and the musicians call it making love. Because I’m in love with him and he’s in love with me, but we so often siphon away that love in our heads and hearts. But when we move together like this, we attach something physical to love. We make it._

_He and I, together like this – we make love. We make our love real._

Now, there’s the pretense of fucking. They do all that well enough. It’s convincing enough.

There’s the regimented removal of clothes – a shirt for a shirt, jeans for jeans. The minutes and hours they’d once spent on each button, treasuring each slip of newly revealed skin are gone now.

There’s no time for that.

There’s the awkward break that comes when he fumbles through his nightstand’s only drawer for a half-empty box of condoms she tries not to think about. He’s no longer just hers to have sex with – he’s no longer just hers to fuck, though not that they’ve ever done that before. It’s only natural that he’d get what he’d once gotten from her from someone else. In the past ten years, she certainly has.

From Trev, from Adam. From the guy who she refers to as Boston-to-L.A.-flight-guy because she’d never gotten his name. From some others, too.

Then, there’s the quietness of it all. Tender words and sweet sighs have no place here, not when he’s fucking her and she’s fucking him.

Here, there’s only room for primitivity, for low grunts and groans and sharply inhaled, stuttered breaths. Here, there’s only room for the sound of friction, of skin moving against skin, of lowly creaking headboards and the sigh of his room settling in around them as they shake and rattle it.

She breaks and lets slip his name from her lips once when he pushes her over the edge – she can’t help it – but even then, it falls out in only a whisper.

 _“Jug,”_ she says, but she’s almost sure he misses it entirely; her voice is buried under the sound of the rain.

It’s a good thing that he misses it. There’s no place for any of that here – for names, for love and affection. All of that belongs somewhere else and far away from this.

She knows what fucking is.

But whatever they’re doing now simply isn’t that.

 

**_5:37 a.m._ **

What ends up tipping her off is the way he kisses her.

He doesn’t do it often, and when his restless mouth looks for something to do and taste, more often than not he finds his way to her collarbone, to the curve of her neck and the underside of her breast. They’re all places on her that are far less intimate than kissing her right there on the mouth.

 _Air,_ she thinks,  _i_ _s such a vital and necessary thing to life_ ; it’s so much like the water still beating down from the broken skies. And when he kisses her, when he shares her air and oxygen like that, when he cuts off her supply with his – that’s the most intimate thing of all. There’s trust there. There’s trust in putting his life into her hands, hers into his, even if only for a minute.

He doesn’t kiss her often, but in the moments that he gives in to whatever is holding him back, he kisses her softly and sweetly.

He kisses her the way he did when they were sixteen.

He kisses her the way he did when he’d been in love with her.

But what surprises her the most is how she kisses him; it’s steeped in memory, too.

She kisses him the way she had when she’d been in love with him, too.

 

**_5:42 a.m._ **

After, she rests her tired, heavy head on the ridge of his shoulder. He has the edge of his hand just barely pressed against her thigh. They’re whispers, they’re poor, sorry duplicates of the way they used to lay in moments like these.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she thinks she might miss that – the way they’d once been so close.

As she listens to his steady breathing right there next to her, she thinks that she even might miss him.

Outside, the rain stops.

 

 

 


	4. Friday, Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for this chapter - major character death, discussion of death and related themes, grief.
> 
> Thank you to bugggghead for her wonderful eyes and thoughts!

_And if you don’t love me now, you will never love me again._

**_8:30 a.m._ **

****Friday - Day 2** **

Her alarm wakes him.

In an effort to do the gentlemanly thing by her, since he’s fully aware of just how egregiously he’s been lacking in that area where she’s concerned, he slides his arm out from under her and tries to grab her phone before it wakes her, too.

But his good intentions backfire, because of course they do, and just as he leans and reaches across her, she inhales sharply and rockets straight up at the noise.

Her forehead clocks hard and shatteringly loudly right against his.

_“Ow!”_

“Sorry!” he rambles off immediately while rubbing at his own head. “I didn’t – I’m sorry.”

When she turns to him, she looks so confused in a way he thinks has nothing to do with the mild concussion he’d just given her. For a moment, she looks like she has no idea where she is or why she might be here. Why he of all people is here with her, and in various stages of undress, too.

Then, her narrowed eyes widen in understanding.

“It’s fine,” she says, flicking off the alarm. The fact that she pulls the blanket to her neck before she does fails to escape him. “I’m going to change. We should get going soon.”

Every single one of these thirty seconds they’ve been awake so far have been awkward enough, so he does what little he can in the way of offering her privacy by fumbling around for his own phone and firing off the rote _‘I’m sick-cough-can’t come in today-cough’_ email while she sweeps up her clothes. He considers helping her because he’s sure that her tumbling flat off the bed in a tangle of naked arms and legs onto the floor is the last thing she wants, but he decides against it even though he thinks it’s mere seconds before that becomes a reality.

She’s so determined to not look at him that he figures any hand he could offer her right now would only make everything worse.

There’s a strange display of acrobatics from her as she shimmies on her shirt with one hand while still clutching the blanket over her chest with the other, and the same part of him that’d wanted to help her moments before wants to tell her now to just relax. It’s not like he’d taken no notice of her breasts the night before, and it’s not like he hasn’t seen them hundreds of times before that, either.

But he keeps his mouth shut about that, too.

Dressed in the tee he’d stacked on top of her towel the night before, she pads off to the bathroom, crossing the small studio in a few large, leap-like strides.

 _She looks good,_ he finds himself thinking as she does. _Ten years later and she still looks good in my shirt._

 

**_8:32 a.m._ **

He makes coffee while he waits and tries not to think about her.

In hindsight, he doesn’t think that he should’ve kissed her.

He also thinks that he _definitely_ shouldn’t have had sex with her. He’s been through enough of life now to know that a kiss can be meaningless, as can sex, but he also doesn’t know how true that theory stands when applied to her.

It’s not like he’s been holding a flame for her all these years. It’s nothing like that. He hasn’t pined, at least he doesn’t think he has; there’s been no green light on the other side of the bay. He’s no Gatsby, they’re not Romeo and Juliet, and he’s no poet – he’s just someone who writes reviews for books that he frankly thinks he could write better if only he were given the chance to. But there’s no great sorrow or sadness in their love – they’re just two people with lives that went in separate directions long ago. It’s a boring, common story – he’d go as far as to say it’s one of the most common in the world.

There’d been nothing tragic about them. What had happened had just been life. Just life.

At least, that’s what he’d thought before he’d kissed her and before he’d had sex with her.

After he kicks away yesterday’s clothes to the side of the bed – clothes he thinks might be bound straight for the trash because he in no way wants to see them again – he sits at the dining table held steady by three sugar packets under the lopsided leg and adjusts his beanie back over his head.

He thinks about what Fred Andrews had said to him _,_ the words he’d dismissed so immediately because he’d thought they in no way, shape, or form related to him.

_Love is something that lingers and remains._

If he’s being honest, he doesn’t think he’s still in love with her, at least, not in the way he’d been in love with her way back when. That love had been a big, foolish, stupid kind of love, one that he hadn’t known at the time but that’d simply been so characteristic of plain old youth. He’d loved her – he can without a shadow of a doubt say that he’d so wholly and truly loved her. But he’d also dreamed far too much for them. He’d wanted too much for them, he’d expected too much from himself, from her, from the world; he had been Icarus instead of Daedalus and he’d flown much too high.

 _No._ He isn’t in love with her like that anymore; he’s absolutely sure of that.

But, he also thinks, there was something in the way they’d battled each other the night before.

There’d been feeling there.

If there wasn’t, he doesn’t think she would’ve screamed at him the way she did. He wouldn’t have yelled at her the way he had. If they’d truly run their well dry and exhausted every feeling in the book, then what he thinks they would’ve been doing was sitting there and staring at each other, faces blank and hearts full of apathy. And he’d tried to. He’d tried so hard to meet her anger with indifference because he hadn’t wanted to dust off the history book again and go through what had happened line by line, fight by fight, mistake by mistake. He’d spent the entire day angry at her and it’d gotten him nowhere. What was the point of all that anger? It’s not like it mattered anymore, especially in the face of the reason that had brought her back to him in the first place.

But she’d pushed and pushed, and egged him on – and that, he supposes, is the crux of it all. Because if there was really nothing, shouldn’t he have been able to hold his own against all that?

If there was really nothing at all, shouldn’t everything have simply ended in flatly spoken whispers instead of, quite literally, with a bang?

 

**_8:40 a.m._ **

That’s what he tries avoid thinking about most – the fact that he’d had sex with her.

More accurately, he tries to avoid thinking about the fact that he hadn’t simply fucked her like she’d explicitly requested. He doesn’t know what they’d done exactly, but it definitely hadn’t been that.

He knows how carefully she chooses her words and that in asking that of him, she’d been asking for something incredibly specific – pure and unadulterated detachment. No love, no hate even – just sex. Just indifference.

 _And that was fine,_ he’d thought. That was just fine because sex like that is simple. It’s neat and clean, and it’s something that can be wrapped up into a nice box with a bow when so much else in life can’t be.

He’d thought when she’d asked him for that, it would be something he’d be able to give her easily because up until he’d tried and failed spectacularly at it, he’d thought that indifference was exactly what he’d felt for her. And, he’s gotten used to it, too – sex without emotions, fucking without feeling. He does, after all, have the very oddly named Cricket in his life just for that. Or had – he knows he doesn’t have it in him to continue on the way he has been after last night.

Which reminds him.

He glances up to the bathroom door, still closed, before reaching for his phone. In his hands, it feels heavy and hot, like iron set over a flame now burning a brand into his palm.

 _I know it’s raining_ , he reads _,_ deliberately avoiding the timestamp and the long line of prior _‘my-place-or-yours’_ texts as he does; in the light of day, it’s all a little seedy. _But are you up?_

He doesn’t know why these words now have him fighting the urge to forcibly remove Betty from the bathroom just so he can stand under the hottest water his building provides, but they do. He’s seen these words from Cricket before, and prior to her, that from Debbie up until she’d stopped sending them when the inevitable _‘I-have-a-boyfriend-now-and-things-just-got-serious-so-we-should-probably-stop-doing-this’_ six-month mark rolled around.

He’s seen these words from a handful of other girls, too.

And he’s also sent them himself.

 _Sorry_ , he types back. _Fell asleep._

 _Nw_ , she answers.

 _No worries_ , his mind fills in; he means so little to her that she can’t even give him the time of day to type out those two short words.

Not that she means anything more to him, either. It’d been a good arrangement – he’d liked the simplicity of it all. Fewer words, fewer feelings, just everything physical and nothing more. There was less chance for mess that way, less chance for pain and hurt.

He supposes now there are going to have to be at least a few more words offered on his part.

He sighs, running both hands over his face – he’s never been the one to end the benefit before, so to speak. He’s always been the layover for others on the way to full fledged monogamy, not the other way around; not that he’s on the way to full fledged monogamy either given that Betty won’t even look at him.

 _Sex is sex is sex,_ he’d told himself, and he’d believed it, too.

 

**_8:44 a.m._ **

He’s always dealt well in superlatives. Pasta is good. Pizza is better. Burgers are best. He loves his mother. He loves his father more. He loves his sister most.

He’d meant what he’d said to her the night before – he isn’t unmarried now for a lack of wanting. He’s tried, he’s had some girlfriends; they’ve all been nice. He’s gone on nice dates with them, they’ve said nice things to him, and they’ve all looked perfectly nice. They’ve even had nice sex.

But because he’s always operated in the mindset of superlatives, he’s also shot himself in the foot with each girl. Not purposefully and half the time not even consciously, but he has.

Sabrina said nice things to him, but Betty said wonderful things.

Trula was pretty, but Betty was beautiful.

He’d loved them, he thinks, he’d loved them all well enough. He’d loved them with the pieces of his shabbily sewn back together-heart that still knew how to love another.

But he’d loved Betty with his whole heart, red and unbroken, beating only for her.

And it had bothered him. He’d walked away from Betty because he’d thought that he’d been doing the right thing for her and for himself; living a life constantly on the outside like that would, at the end of it all, never lead them anywhere good.

But neither would a life of constantly comparing current girlfriends to the one he’d unceremoniously dumped.

So he had sex with girls who had wanted nothing more from him than that. And it’d been easy – they were satisfied and so was he; they got theirs, he got his. This way, he’d only be forced to compare this one thing about Betty to the rest – sex.

Just one thing. Just that one thing.

Over time, it’d gotten easier to forget all that, too. The way she moved with him, the way she kissed him, the way she’d arch and turn her neck as he’d run his mouth along that smooth, columned curve of her neck.

In the dark, a neck was just a neck, a kiss was just a kiss.

Jughead sighs and looks towards the closed door. He can hear the stream from the shower running steadily; if she’s even standing in it, which is up for debate, she’s not moving much at all.

_Sex is sex is sex._

He wonders, if on some level, he’s always known he’d been lying to himself.

 

**_9:15 a.m._ **

She glides past him when she exits his bathroom, tote taloned in her arms and hair thrown up in a haughtily severe ponytail.

He shuffles right past her and pushes the door shut with his heel.

He looks at the water droplets sliding down the bathtub and realizes then that her hair had been dry.

 

**_9:16 a.m._ **

He sighs at the mess of a man he sees in the mirror – unkempt hair, deeply etched in lines under his eyes, and a level weariness he doesn’t know that he’s seen on himself before.

 _It is what it is_ , he thinks.

He shoves his toothbrush into his mouth and turns away from his reflection.

 

**_9:19 a.m._ **

“Ready?” she asks as he flips off the bathroom light.

“I made coffee while you were getting ready,” he blurts out. He doesn’t mean to scare, her but his good intentions fail him again – at his voice, she starts and drops the pink sweater she’d been wearing yesterday onto the floor. Quickly, she swoops down and picks it back up again.

“Oh,” she says. “Thanks, but we should probably just-”

“Go,” he finishes for her. “I know. Here.”

In this moment, he’s grateful for his second travel mug and for the fact that he hadn’t lumped it into the pile of junk he’d carted over to Goodwill the last time he’d moved. He hasn’t been in a situation that demands a second travel mug in a while – the situation that has him using the word we instead of I – but he’d figured that if he’d accidentally left his one and only mug in the dishwasher at work or left it on the subway one day, having a backup around couldn’t hurt.

“Thank you.” She accepts the coffee he holds out to her without so much as looking at him. “Where’s the trash?”

“Oh, uh,” he says, looking around wildly. _Pull yourself together_ , he instructs himself _. It’s a simple question._ “Under the sink.”

She tilts her shoulders away from him and brushes up against the kitchen counter as she opens the cabinet in what he thinks is a calculated move not to bump into or touch him at all; and with one quick flick of her wrist, she throws in her sweater without so much as a hint of hesitation. He watches as one of the sleeves pathetically flops over the edge as it tries and fails to grab onto nothing but thin air before falling into the plastic-lined abyss.

“Let’s go,” she says.

She doesn’t wait for him to follow, but in a way he prefers that – he has some cleaning of his own to do and he doesn’t need her looking over his shoulder while he does it.

When he’s sure that she’s out of earshot, he quickly scoops up his clothes from the day before that he’d kicked under his bed and tosses them into the trash alongside hers.

 

**_9:21 a.m._ **

She doesn’t argue with him about who should drive this time.

Instead, she simply hands him the keys in her two outstretched fingers and climbs into the passenger seat when he unlocks the door.

Maybe it’s simply exhaustion that has her acting like this now – they’ve both slept for a handful of hours in what had felt like a never-ending two-day stretch filled entirely with stress and worry and anguish.

And some damn good sex, but that’s neither here nor there.

But more likely, he thinks, the silent treatment is about just him and what’d happened.

She still hasn’t looked at him. She’s barely even spoken to him. True, he doesn’t know exactly what to say to her either, but he thinks that there must be something worth saying.

At the very least, there are things he’d like to know.

Is she at all confused, because he’s at the very least a little confused.

Was last night the closure she never got ten years ago or was it something else? Something new, something less defined?

Did last night mean anything to her?

At all?

Did it mean anything to him?

He thinks it might have.

 

**_9:32 a.m._ **

_Ask her,_ he tells himself. _You’ll never know if you don’t._

_Just ask her._

 

**_9:42 a.m._ **

“Hey, so did you want to talk about-”

“-no.”

“-last night?”

“No.”

He’d figured as much.

“Okay.”

 

**_9:44 a.m._ **

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

 

**_9:52 a.m._ **

“Jug.”

“Hmm?”

“Thanks for the coffee.”

She still doesn’t look directly at him. But he catches her lingering gaze out of the corner of his eye.

 

**_10:03 a.m._ **

As he pulls her great beast of a truck into the hospital’s parking lot, she turns business-like.

The upside is that she finally looks at him. She finally talks to him and not to her feet, or to the floorboards, or to the car window she’s been pressing the tip of her nose up against.

“Fred and Mary are probably exhausted,” she says to him. “We should take over for them when we get up there. Give them a chance to get coffee or something.”

“Yeah,” he agrees easily. “That’s- yeah.”

With a quick turn of his wrist, he kills the ignition and leans his head back on the headrest. He doesn’t want to complain because all things considered, he’s perfectly fine. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with him.

Except the fact that he’s every kind of exhausted he’s ever felt before. His head hurts, likely from a combination of too much coffee and definitely not close to enough sleep. His entire left arm hurts because she’d had it pinned beneath her shoulders the night before and he thinks he might’ve twisted funny in his sleep because of that. It hasn’t been all that long since he’s had another woman in his bed, but it has been a while since he’s _shared_ that bed with anyone where the activity of sleeping is concerned.

His heart hurts because this is all just one big, giant mess that he’d never wanted to get into in the first place.

And he’s older now.

He’s older now.

He can’t run away from any of this like he had at twenty.

So he gives himself a minute – one minute to close his eyes and rest his head, one minute to not think and just feel very, very sorry for himself.

 

**_10:04 a.m._ **

_One._

He’s so tired.

_Seventeen._

He’s so, so tired. So much of him wants to just fall asleep right here.

_Twenty-one._

It wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world. Time would move so much faster that way. He could fall asleep and wake up later. Or tomorrow. Or the next day. He’d know then, just like that, what fate waits for Archie without having to live through this horrible in-between. Maybe Betty would even be well on her way back to where she’d come from, too, and he wouldn’t have to deal with that mess, either.

The wondering.

The waiting.

 _Thirty_.

He could do it. He wants to so badly.

_Forty-two._

_Forty-three._

_Forty-four._

He nearly cuts off his countdown prematurely when he feels something brushing against his hand, gently and softly, and so much so that he wonders if he’s imagining it.

_Forty-five._

Is that her hand on his?

_Forty-six._

_Yes,_ he thinks. Were it any other time, he might not be as sure. But he’s had the privilege of feeling her fingers curling around his shoulders and digging into his collarbone very recently; he can still feel the imprint over the places where she’d gripped him and run her hands, hot and scalding like a newly scorched brand. He can still remember the rhythmic hum of her skin on his.

And when she slides her palm against his, slightly rough to the touch, he knows without a shadow of a doubt that it’s her hand and no one else’s holding steady against his in comfort.

_Forty-eight._

She squeezes his fingers once, firmly.

_Forty-nine._

_I wish I could stay here_ , he thinks. _I want to stay here_.

_Fifty._

_No._

He has one minute to stay here and feel very sorry for himself. Because nothing right now is about him – there are other moments in his life that might be, but this one here isn’t.

These moments are about Archie right now and spending what time he can with him, even if he never wakes up. It’s about being there for his friend who’s always been there for him, even if he doesn’t know it.

And, it’s even about Betty, as difficult as that is for him to admit.

It’s about being there for her, too. Whatever they are or aren’t, whatever comes or doesn’t come from the night before, she’s someone who’s going through this now, too.

The waiting and the wondering.

She shouldn’t have to go through this alone. They both made the same promise to Archie once long ago. Friends forever, or something like that. Friends until the end.

_Fifty-nine._

In the final second and only then, he allows himself to give into her. Curving his fingers over the edge of her palm, he returns the favor she’d extended and grips her hand firmly with his own.

When he does, the sharp ridges of her knuckles push together and dig ever so slightly into the flesh of his own palm.

 

**_10:05 a.m._ **

_She reached out,_ he thinks, snapping his eyes open and gently pulling his hand away from hers.

It’s only right that he reach back to her, too.

 

**_10:09 a.m._ **

Ever polite, she pauses them both before Archie’s door and knocks before entering. “Mr. Andrews,” Betty greets in a bright but quiet whisper. “Mrs. Andrews.”

“Betty,” Fred says, standing to hug her. He gets a firm clap on the shoulder. “Jughead. Did you both manage to sleep?”

“Oh, uh, yeah,” he says, shoving his hands into his pockets in an effort to hide the sweat he feels gathering there. Technically, it’s not a lie. “We slept.”

Together, too, but Fred Andrews doesn’t need to know that.

“How’s he doing today?” Betty asks.

Mary sighs and shrugs. He’s surprised by how much she looks like Archie when she does, or how much Archie looks like her. He’d always thought Archie looked more like Fred, and maybe he did in his younger days. But there’s more of his mother in him now, and it’s so much easier for him to see that while Archie sleeps.

“He’s the same,” Mary tells them. “But I’m glad you’re both here.”

“Of course we are,” Betty says. “We wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. We can sit with Archie, Mrs. Andrews, if you and Mr. Andrews wanted to get some coffee or food. Or just rest for a bit. We’ll sit with him – he won’t be alone.”

He watches as Mary looks to them, Betty first, then him, and only then over to Fred. A crawling sense of embarrassment falls over him when he catches Mary raising her eyebrows in question at Archie’s father.

Fred Andrews still loves Archie’s mom – he knows that now.

But does Mary Andrews know that? Does _she_ still love Archie’s dad?

He wonders what she even thinks of Fred as. He wonders what she even calls him.

 _Ex-husband_ would be the right term, he supposes. _But it’s so harsh_.

Ex. Everything that came before summed up into two letters, and one simple demarcation – two lines diagonally crossed over each other in the most ironic of symbols, given that the very term implies the very uncrossing of those lines.

Linguistically speaking, it’s right – _ex_.

But it doesn’t _feel_ right. It doesn’t feel right that these two people standing here over their son’s unconscious body, leaning on each other for support, and using each other’s shoulders to cry on should be boiled down to nothing more than simple exes.

It barely feels right to him when it comes to him and Betty now.

But then again, a word at the end of the day is nothing more than just that. They’ve always meant more to him, he’s always put more stock in them than most, and maybe it’s only him that’s so bothered by the dichotomy now.

He certainly hadn’t been bothered by it before today, he reminds himself.

“Thank you, Betty, Jughead,” Mary says to them, nodding her messy red head in both their directions. It’s disconcerting – he’s never seen her look anything less than put together. “Fred? What do you think?”

Ever acquiescent, Fred Andrews shrugs back. “Lead the way. You’ll call if anything changes?”

Jughead figures it’s his turn to answer one. “We’ll call,” he says.

His answer gets him a look in response, one he knows well; one he still remembers from sixteen.

 _It’s ironic,_ he finds himself musing again, and a funny little twist of fate, too, because that’s what he’d just been thinking about – words. Their import or lack thereof, their meaning.

He knows it’s what Fred Andrews is hung up on now as he ushers Archie’s mother out the door, one hand on her shoulder, and eyebrows raised at him. Words, and one in particular.

 _‘We’ll call,’_ he’d said. We’ll call.

_We._

 

**_10:23 a.m._ **

“Betty.”

“Hmm?” she hums over.

“I still think we should talk about-”

“Jughead, come on.”

“What?”

“Don’t.”

He sighs, letting his head dip in the valley between his hunched shoulders. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“But what if I do?”

“Now you want to talk,” she says sharply. “That’s all I wanted last night.” She scoffs, slapping her hands down on either armrest. “I didn’t realize I had to fuck the words out of you.”

“Jesus, Betty,” he says. Those words sound so ugly in the light of day in a way they hadn’t before. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Well, I’m not. Happy?”

“Of course not-”

“I mean, what is there to say? What do you _want_ _me_ to say? After everything you so kindly told me last night, and after ten years no less, I still asked you to fu-”

Her voice trails, but he knows the words she’s stumbling on. He’d been there, too; he knows what had happened. He knows what she said.

He watches as she brushes the few fly-aways from her forehead back onto the top of her ponytail. There’s a quick swoop of pink that crosses her cheeks before she tips her head down, but even when she hides her face from him, her fingers give away more than he thinks she intends for them to.

They strain against the crown of her head and clench tightly as they grip her temples.

“Jug,” she mutters. “Honestly, how do you think I feel?”

 _Embarrassed_ , he concludes somewhat stupidly when it suddenly dawns on him. Pink cheeks, downcast eyes, shoulders hunched over – _she’s embarrassed._

And how could she not be? He’d wanted to be honest – he figured she deserved that after ten years of waiting – but his good intentions still don’t dismiss the fact that he’d outright said to her that, _yes_ , there’d been something big enough that’d forced him to break them years ago. Whether or not his reasons, his many great and stupid reasons had anything to do with how much he wanted or loved her, there had been something that had eclipsed all of that. There’d been something big enough in their past that’d made him walk away from her.

And he knows her. Maybe not all of her anymore, maybe not even most of her – but he knows now that he still _does_ know parts of her.

Maybe in the darkness and haze of last night, it’d been easy for her to walk back to him.

But in the light of day, he knows just how hard a thing that is for her to face.

“Betty, I-”

“Guys, this is the most annoying sound to wake up to.”

He freezes.

His throat wraps around the words he already can’t remember, holding them back. His heart bungees down to his stomach and immediately, right back up again, and every part of him just freezes – his thoughts, his movement, his pulse.

He checks first to make sure he isn’t hearing things by peering a little too intently into Archie’s half open eyes and slowly moving fingers.

But Archie’s eyes are really open. And his fingers are really moving.

“I’m pretty sure your snoring beats this by miles,” Jughead hears himself croaking back.

Across from him, Betty jumps up from her seat, so suddenly and so forcefully that her chair tips right over, crashing loudly to the ground. A warbled sob escapes from the back of her throat as she leans over and wraps her arms around as much of Archie as she can, then, she’s muttering incoherent words he doesn’t even care that he can’t make out.

“It’s okay, Betty,” Archie tells her, holding onto her left hand tightly with his own. “It’s okay.”

Over her shoulder, slowly but so surely, Archie smiles.

 

**_11:01 a.m._ **

They all take turns sitting with Archie, with Fred and Mary Andrews taking the first shift. And rightfully so, he supposes – they are his parents.

He follows Betty in silence down to the café and has every intention of sharing a rickety table with her, even if it is in silence. But when she pulls out her computer and flips it open, burying her face behind it, he reads her message loud and clear.

_Go away._

_Fine_ , he thinks. _That’s just fine._ If that’s the game she wants to play, then fine.

At the table next to hers, he takes out his own computer and sighs as his untouched inbox updates and ports through to him, growing in length and misery by the second.

He tries to focus on his work – there’s so much that needs to be done – but he finds himself distracted by her instead.

 

**_11:47 a.m._ **

“You rang?” he jokes, holding the door to Archie’s room open for Betty before stepping through himself.

“I feel like I’m in the twilight zone,” Archie says. _The guy’s still smiling_ , Jughead thinks. _He’s still grinning like a fool even after rolling over the hood of a car._ And that Archie can find the strength to smile like that after everything has Jughead smiling, too. “It’s _so_ _weird_ seeing you guys together again.”

“We’re not-”

“Can we get you anything?” Betty interrupts, her quick and flurrying hands busy fluffing the pillows behind Archie’s head. “Water? More pillows? Is it too cold in here? Too hot?”

“Betty,” Archie says, pointing to the chair brushing up against the backs of her knees. “ _Chill_. I just want to hang right now. This is nice.”

“What is?” he asks, claiming the seat that Betty doesn’t.

“This.” There’s a feeble attempt from Archie to draw his hand around and gesture between the three of them. Jughead is thankful that Archie is awake, he’s so thankful and relieved, and every adjacent feeling there is to that, too, but seeing Archie weak like this is disconcerting.

 _This is the twilight zone,_ he thinks. Archie was right about that. But at least he’s awake. Strength can come later.

“Us just being together again in the same room is cool,” Archie says. “It’s been, like, _forever_ since we’ve done this.”

It hits him then that his not seeing Betty for however many years they’ve done this song and dance around each other might’ve been his choice, but it was never Archie’s. Archie had never asked for the burden of having his friends at arm’s length with the other; he’d never asked for the circle of their carefully grown friendship to break into a line that he’d been forced to stand in the middle of, holding either end steady.

“Yeah,” Jughead says, for lack of anything better. What else _can_ he say? He’s not the one who can give back time. “It’s been a while.”

“Arch,” Betty starts, carefully laying her hand across Archie’s bandage-wrapped one. “I’m so sorry I haven’t seen you in so long. I should’ve called you on your birthday. I should’ve been home last Christmas. I should’ve-”

“Betty, it’s okay,” Archie tells her. “You were going through... stuff.”

“I know,” Betty says. “But it’s no excuse, Archie. I want – I _need_ you to know that I’m sorry. And that it shouldn’t have taken all this for me to make my way down here.”

“It’s just life,” Archie tells her gently. “Shit gets in the way. It happens and it’s not your fault. But we’re all here now. It’s like old times, you know?”

He can see the weight of Archie’s forgiveness crossing her shoulders as they slump over. She’s always been hard on herself, even after the olive branch has been extended. She holds her wrongs against herself far longer than anyone else holds them against her.

With his elbow propped against the thin, hospital-grade mattress, Jughead reaches his hand across the divide, across Archie, and holds his hand up to her, palm facing towards the skies.

He doesn’t know whose sake it’s for – Archie’s or her own, or even his – but she meets him halfway and turns her hand down into his.

“Yeah,” he says as Archie’s hand falls on top of theirs. “It’s just like old times.”

 

**_12:16 p.m._ **

He gets his one-on-one moment when Archie unwittingly sends Betty hightailing out of the room.

“You both smell the same,” Archie ventures after a round of loud, bizarre sniffing.

Jughead feels the corners of his mouth pull down in confusion. “What?”

“You smell the same,” Archie repeats. “Like you’re wearing the same perfume or cologne or something.”

 _Shampoo_ , he realizes – they both smell like his shampoo.

“Oh,” he starts quickly. “That’s-”

“Wait – did you guys _sleep_ -”

“I’ll give you guys a moment to catch up alone,” Betty blurts out, rising from her seat quickly and scooting back her chair loudly as she does. “I could use some coffee. Arch, I’ll talk to you later. Jug, come get me when you’re done?”

“Will do,” he tells her.

There’s too much strength coursing through her when she pulls on the door, and it knocks hard against her foot as she sends it flying open. He winces for her when she holds her face steady through the pain.

“Nice shirt, Betty,” Archie throws out teasingly.

When Jughead turns back to Archie, grinning widely and so roguishly at him, grinning so _knowingly_ , he knows he’ll have to answer for the red cheeks and flustered hands that had just rushed out the door.

 

**_12:18 p.m._ **

“Care to explain?” Archie asks.

“Honestly, not really.”

“Why not?”

“When have I ever wanted to talk about this?” Jughead asks.

“Fine,” Archie relents. “You look like such crap, by the way.”

“You look worse,” he says, thankful for the change of subject even if it is at his expense. “In all seriousness, how are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve been run over by a car.”

“What’s that like?”

“The worst,” Archie says easily. “Nah. Honestly, I don’t remember much of it. I feel like I just woke up from a really good nap.”

Jughead breathes in deeply before squaring his shoulders and meeting Archie’s kind eyes with his own.

 _You’re going to look him square in the eye and own up to what you’ve done,_ he thinks. _Man-to-man._

“Listen, Archie,” Jughead says. “I’m sorry about your birthday.”

“What? Why?” Archie asks. “You texted me.”

Jughead almost laughs. Archie expects so little from him – the barest of bare minimums. And he’s done that. But that still doesn’t sit right with him, even if Archie is saying the bare minimum is enough. It’s just not right. He’s older now and these are his people – Archie, the Andrews.

Even Betty.

He needs to do better by them. And he has a second chance to.

“I meant your birthday two years ago,” Jughead says quietly. “I should’ve been there for it, and for all the others, too. I was just – I was going through some shit at the time.”

He watches as Archie’s eyes immediately go wide at the information, in the exact same way they’d done when they were kids peering over a dead frog or a worm split in half, or something equally as disgusting. Jughead thinks that Archie might even respond in the same way that he always has, too, with his helpful, hopeful, glass-half-full pep talks because there isn’t a lot about him that’s different.

But then again, Archie’s always been one for surprises.

“You good now?” Archie asks after a beat.

No questions, no prying, no rah-rah motivational speeches – just the three words he hadn’t known he needed to hear from his best friend.

_You good now._

_Maybe this is it_ , Jughead thinks then. _Maybe this is what growing up really looks like._

“Yeah,” he says eventually, nodding slowly. “I think I am.”

“Cool,” Archie says. “Just be at the next birthday, okay? I’m getting a keg.”

Archie’s hand trembles unsteadily as he holds it out to him, but Jughead doesn’t hesitate in reaching over and shaking back. He’s faltered in the name of friendship before in a way that Archie never once has.

He’s done hesitating. He’s done faltering.

“Deal,” Jughead says.

He means it.

 

**_12:23 p.m._ **

“So. Betty,” Archie says, prodding at the subject again.

He should’ve known that the reprieve wouldn’t last long.

“Betty,” he repeats back.

“She’s here.”

“I’m aware,” Jughead answers.

“How long has it been?”

He shrugs, and for no reason at all because he knows exactly how long it’s been, to the day. “Ten years.”

_And three months, and twenty-one days._

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Jughead,” Archie says. “I know how much walking away from her sucked for you-”

“Archie, it was ten years ago. It’s ancient history that doesn’t need to be discussed.”

“But it sucked for her, too, you know?”

Jughead pauses at the firm reprimand. He can’t hold the fact that Archie doesn’t know he and Betty had already opened, and subsequently set up in flames, the history book of them the night before against the guy.

And, he supposes he deserves some flack for his actions ten years ago; actions have consequences, even if they happen to arrive ten years later.

“I know,” Jughead mutters back.

“Look, I’m not blaming you. It was a long time ago. We were all stupid back then.”

Jughead tries and fails to hold back his scoff. “Yeah,” he says. “Me more than most.”

“We all did what we thought we had to do. All I’m saying is that I know it sucked for the both of you. But I’m glad you’re both here now. I’ve missed this, you know? Like, the three of us just hanging out together. It’s just – it’s nice to have this again.”

“I know,” he says. “And I know it’s my fault that we haven’t been able to for the past ten years. But I don’t know that this… _reunion_ can or will happen again.”

Archie shrugs, his hospital gown rustling loudly against the thin sheets. “You guys seem to be doing fine now. I mean, you’re both awkward as hell around each other, but you always have been.”

“Thanks.”

“It probably gets better with time.”

“Arch, don’t match-make. It doesn’t suit you.”

“I’m not! I’m just saying that you guys were friends for like, ever, before you started doing your dating-thing. Who’s to say you can’t go back to that again?”

“I don’t know,” he says. Him, her. Life – it’s all to say.

“Out of curiosity,” Archie ventures. “ _Are_ you going to do anything about it?”

“About what?”

Archie rolls his eyes at him. “Betty. And like, you know, _you guys._ ”

“What? No. Our time came and went years ago. Light years ago, even.” Archie’s eyebrows jump up to his bandage-wrapped hairline and he wants very much in that moment to reach up and shove them back down.

“She called you Jug, though.”

“Everyone calls me that.”

“I don’t know if you’re supposed to know this, but she was engaged before,” Archie says quietly, a secret whispered over to him even with the subject in question floors away.

“I know she was. She told me.”

“She’s not anymore.”

“She told me that, too.”

“So this is your chance.”

“For what?”

“To be with her again, dumbass. I thought you were the smart one.”

“You’re kidding me,” Jughead says. “How can I be with her? She doesn’t even live here. And even if we got past the whole _how_ part, I don’t know that I _want_ to be with her.”

“You’ve always wanted to be with her. And you slept with her.”

“Who, Betty?” he asks innocently. “No, I didn’t.”

“You’re such a shit liar.”

“I didn’t sleep with her.”

“Jughead, I’m not stupid.”

“Fine. So what if I did?”

“Dude, you gave that up way too easily. Weak,” Archie sing-songs.

“Yeah, well, I’m tired.”

Archie laughs, congratulating himself on the meaningless victory before turning serious again. “The last time I saw you, you said that if life worked out differently, you’d still be with her. Doesn’t this qualify as life working out differently? Her being here?”

He doesn’t know why or how Archie’s spotty-at-best memory is choosing this time and place to suddenly be crystal clear. And after he’d been run over by a car, too.

“Three months ago isn’t exactly recently,” Jughead defends. “And I was drunk when I said that.”

“Yeah, but from the drunk man comes the truth.”

“That’s just-” Jughead starts, pulling his phone from his pocket in an effort to delay and find the right words to use. “That’s neither here nor-” _I’m coming up to talk to Archie now,_ he reads. “That’s not- ”

“Who’s texting you?”

“Betty,” he explains. “She wants to talk to you. She’s coming back up.”

“So you’re texting her again, too.”

“Yeah. About you and you only.”

Archie smiles then, drumming his slow-moving fingers triumphantly against the sheets.

“Feeling smug, are we?”

“Sure I am,” Archie says. “I did it.”

“Did what?”

“I brought you guys back together again.”

Jughead nods slowly, slipping the evidence back into his pocket. In a way, Archie’s not wrong. They are back together again, floating around each other’s orbit in a way they hadn’t been two days ago. She’s a presence in his phone again, a presence in his mind. She’s a presence in his heart, even if he doesn’t know exactly what to do with that yet. She’s there whether he likes it or not.

“Yeah,” he admits quietly as he stands slowly – credit where credit is due. “I guess you did.”

“Jug,” Archie calls. “Thanks for being here, man.”

“You’re my best friend, Archie.” Jughead pauses – he’s good with his words, but he’s never been great at putting whatever lies within his head and his heart into them. “And you’re my brother – there’s no place else I’d rather be.”

 

**_12:43 p.m._ **

At the café, he gives the room a quick scan before walking up to the table Fred Andrews sits alone at. He doesn’t think that Fred looks especially in want of company but there’s a coldness to the way that Mary Andrews keeps to herself at her own table, surrounded by stacks of files overflowing onto the chair opposite her and her computer, that makes him feel the need to reach out to the man sitting with nothing but a paper coffee cup. Fred’s gaze is fixed down at his hands wrapped around the cup and Jughead approaches slowly, shuffling his feet over instead of stepping and stomping loudly.

Archie is awake, but if Fred is anything like him, the older man is still doing his best to shake off the remnants of his stress and anxiety. An ambush is not what any of them need right now.

“Hey, Mr. Andrews,” he starts, balancing his hand unsteadily over the seat’s back. “Do you mind?”

“Of course not, Jughead,” Fred tells him, smiling as he gestures to the chair. “You know you don’t need to ask.”

“Thanks.”

“How’re you doing?” Fred asks.

“Shouldn’t I be the one asking you that?”

The older man shrugs, but his shoulders rise and fall with relief. “I’m great,” Fred says. “I’m happy.”

Jughead nods in understanding. _How could he not be?_ Archie is alive and cracking off-color jokes again, Archie is smiling like he always has – they all should be over the moon right now.

“But,” Fred continues. “You don’t seem to be.”

“I’m just tired. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m happy Archie is awake. I really am.”

“I know you are. But I don’t think that’s what’s on your mind.”

 _No_ , he supposes, _it’s not at all._

“I think I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” Jughead whispers. It’s a difficult thing for him to admit in any voice greater than that. “And I didn’t realize just how many I’d made until now.”

Fred folds his hands neatly across the small café table and knits his bushy eyebrows together in thought. “Life happens in the mistakes we make, Jughead,” Fred tells him slowly, measuring out each word with careful consideration. “Without them, we may forget to fall in love or to have children or to fall out of love – we may not learn how to grow but for our mistakes. I used to say this to Archie, and to you, too – I don’t care that you make mistakes. I expect you to and I want you to. What I do care about-”

“Is that once you make them, you do something about it,” Jughead finishes. “I remember.”

Fred nods over to him, smiling as he does.

“But it’s not that easy,” he argues. “The mistakes I’ve made – it’s not like playing with matches and accidentally setting the trash on fire. It’s not using up an entire can of shaving cream just to play with foam in the sink. These are so much bigger than that. These mistakes – they’ve changed relationships. They’ve changed lives.”

_They’ve changed my life._

“Mistakes are mistakes, Jughead, for better or worse. You still deal with them the same way you always have. Find the problem, make it right. Apologize for what you feel that you’ve done wrong and mean it. Learn from it and move on. You know what to do,” the older man says, tapping his fingers twice on the table top. “Even if the mistake in question has to do with Betty, you still approach it in the same way.”

He gives Fred a half-hearted laugh for that. “Am I that obvious?” he asks.

“When it’s about Betty – yeah, Jug. You always have been. And speaking of.” Jughead watches as the man’s eyes swing up to the doors behind his back. He doesn’t have to look to know exactly who’s coming in his direction. “I’ll leave you two to it. But don’t kill each other, okay? There’s been enough hurt kids for one week.”

Jughead nods; he doesn’t know how to argue with that. He doesn’t know that he should.

“Learn to forgive yourself,” Fred suggests slowly. “Sometimes, that’s the only way you can forgive everyone else around you.”

He watches as the older man smiles and thanks Betty quietly for keeping Archie company for the past half-hour. Her answer back is exactly what he expects – that she’s happy to do it, that it’s no bother for her – and her predictability, he finds, is worlds less irritating than he’d found it yesterday.

He’d go as far as to say it’s endearing now. At least a little.

“Oh, and Jug?” Fred says, laying a gentle hand on his shoulder as he turns away. “It’s been thirty years – isn’t it time you just call me Fred?”

 

**_12:56 p.m._ **

She slides into the seat opposite him, which he takes as a win, but she pulls out her computer almost immediately, which he chalks up as a loss.

All in all, he’s still stuck in limbo with her.

“Hey,” he says when she flips her screen up at his face. “Still the silent treatment, huh?”

Her eyes, dull and tired, finally flick to his. “I bought you a new remote.”

“Huh?”

“To replace the one I broke earlier,” she explains. “I’m sorry I, uh, tossed it.”

He thinks what she did far crosses the pretty little line of _‘tossed it’,_ but he lets her have it.

“Honestly?” he says balancing his elbows on the table and leaning his arms across. He makes sure to keep them just dancing on the edge of halfway. “I wish I could’ve seen you throw it.”

It works – she smiles. Just barely, but she smiles.

“It’s one of those universal ones,” Betty continues. “I didn’t know which one I should get, but I figured something with universal in the name would work.”

“You know, you could’ve just asked me.”

“Silent treatment, remember?” she says, but still smiling.

“Look, Betty,” he starts carefully. She’s talking to him right now and like a wild, scared animal in the forest, he knows that one wrong word on his part will send her scurrying away to the depths of the trees and leaves. Or at the very least, to the next table over. “I know you don’t want to talk about this. I know how you must feel and I’m not trying to make it worse. I just – I just wanted to tell you that I don’t regret anything that happened last night. I wanted it as much as you did.”

She looks at him then, holding his gaze for an almost uncomfortable amount of time.

“Okay,” she says.

“And I’m sorry,” he says.

_Man up, man up._

“For what?”

_Grow up._

“For everything that happened ten years ago. I don’t know that I would’ve changed anything about what I did, and honestly, I’m inclined to say that I wouldn’t have. Betty, what I did wasn’t something I decided to do in a moment. You don’t know how much time I spent thinking about it. But you and I were going north and south by that point and I just didn’t think that anything could save us.”

Jughead sighs as he threads his fingers together. “You deserved a say, too. At the very least, you deserved to know why I did what I did so – I’m sorry. I’m sorry I never gave you any of that. And I’m sorry for the way I’ve acted while you’ve been here – you don’t deserve my anger. It’s just – it still feels like it just happened, you know?” he whispers. “I’ve held onto it for so long. I didn’t think that it’d be this raw after ten years, but it is.”

“I know,” she murmurs back. “I didn’t think it would be, either.”

“Betty,” he says slowly, reaching across the table and brushing his fingers over the ridge of her knuckles. “I’m sorry. For everything that happened back then. For how I dealt with it now. I’m sorry.”

He holds his breath as she turns her hand under his. Nothing but his pulse moves as it vibrates under the pads of his fingers, and in that whisper of a moment, he thinks he might feel her own heartbeat thrumming in her thumb flush against his.

 

**_1:02 p.m._ **

“Can you do me a favor?” she asks. She’s returned her hands back to her computer but he can still feel the imprint of her fingers against his wrist.

“Depends.”

“Read this,” she says, turning her computer to face him.

“What am I looking at?”

“Email to my boss. I was vague before about why I haven’t been at work. I figured I needed to give them a better explanation if I want to keep my job.”

“You know, I never asked you what you do for a living,” he says.

“Oh,” she says. “I’m an editor at the _Providence Journal_. It’s nothing.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Say what?”

“That it’s nothing immediately after you told me what you do. You’re an editor, Betty – that’s more than most can say. It’s not nothing.”

He turns his attention back to her computer, free from errant fingerprint smudges unlike his, and frowns on the paragraphs on paragraphs that stare back at him.

“No,” she agrees quietly. He can feel the weight of her gaze on him and he doesn’t dare look up. “I guess it is something.”

She falls quiet again as he edits, and for a moment, he’s hit by how familiar this exact moment with her is.

 

**_1:06 p.m._ **

“You know, I blamed you all these years,” she tells him quietly, hands circling her flimsy coffee cup between her palms.

“I imagine it was easy to.”

“It was,” she says plainly. “But it doesn’t mean that it was right of me.”

His hands still mid-sentence over her keyboard.

“You said last night that you didn’t fit into that world – _my_ world,” she recounts quietly. “I knew that.” Betty sighs, heavily enough that it sends a drop of coffee tumbling over the rim of her cup. “I pushed you to be different because I thought if you were, you’d fit in better there with me. Into my life, into my world. I wanted better for you. Jug, I’ll never not want the best for you. But I was wrong in trying to change you. I just thought if I did, you’d fit in with who I was. I held on to you too tightly because I didn’t want to lose you. And maybe if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have. I’m sorry,” she says, bringing her eyes up from her watery reflection in her coffee to him. “I’ve blamed you for everything for the past ten years and I never once thought to turn any of the fault towards myself. That wasn’t fair to you.”

Betty exhales loudly, dropping her head down just enough so that he can see the soft bump of her ponytail. “I’m glad I wasn’t able to change you,” she tells him. “You did the right thing, Jug. Brooding aside, I like the you that you are now.”

“Do you?” he asks quietly. “I don’t know that there’s much to like about me anymore.”

“There is,” she says, voice chock-full of confidence. “You did the right thing for yourself then – you stood up for yourself when I’d been trying to push you to be someone else. And you’re doing just fine for yourself now – I always knew you would, even if you don’t believe that. You’ve always kept your head above water.”

At that, he smiles over at her. “I believe you.” And he does – honesty has never been a difficult thing to read on her.

“And, you’re here now,” she continues. “You’ve been here for Archie all night long. All day long. Maybe you haven’t been the best kind of friend you could’ve been, but I haven’t been, either. Maybe you didn’t do the right thing ten years ago, but you’re trying to make it right now. What’s not to like about that?”

He smiles then, a wide, stupid kind of grin that she’d always been an expert at drawing out of him. There’s so much honesty in the way she speaks, in the way she praises, and he knows she means every word of what she says.

And to hear words like that from her again is more heart-warming than he’d thought it’d ever be.

“Betty.”

“Hmm?”

“For the record,” he says, turning down her screen over his hands so that he can really look at her. “I like the you that you are now, too.”

 

**_1:08 p.m._ **

“Here.”

“What did you – where are my words?” she asks dumbly.

“No one needs to read how you’re so sorry seven times in one email,” he tells her. “Once is enough. Twice, maybe, if you’ve done something extremely terrible, which you haven’t.”

“But I-”

“Trust me.”

He watches as her lips twist in thought while she scans the words, smiling as she opens and snaps her mouth shut.

“I’m adding one more back in,” she warns.

He shrugs. “I figured you would.”

She laughs lightly to herself as she types out the words.

“So you’re leaving tomorrow,” he ventures, nodding over to her computer. It’s not prying, he reminds himself – she’d asked him to read the email and it isn’t his fault that she’d mentioned every detail of her travel plans to her boss within it.

“Yeah,” she says. “It’s a long drive back up. Speaking of, I, uh, booked a hotel room for tonight. For myself.”

“Oh,” he says slowly _. For myself_ – he’s always been good at reading between the lines she draws for him. These, in particular, are especially uncomplicated.

_Not you. Not again._

_Once was more than enough._

“I appreciate you letting me stay at your apartment last night,” she continues. “But I didn’t want to put you out any more than I already have.”

He figures that’s likely very true because she’s considerate and sometimes to a fault. But he also doesn’t think that had been reason number one in her scrambling for a hotel room, either.

“Say no more,” he tells her. “That’s probably better for you, anyhow. You’ll be more comfortable that way. Honestly, my couch feels like crap.”

“I wouldn’t know,” she says around a hint of a smile.

It’s his turn to laugh to himself. “I guess not.”

“But thank you,” Betty repeats. “I really didn’t want to sleep in my car yesterday.”

“You could stay,” he hears himself blurting out. “If you want. At my apartment tonight, I mean. It’s no bother. You’re welcome to stay for as long as you want.”

He very nearly tacks on a _‘within reason’_ when her eyes snap from her screen to his because he knows exactly what that had just sounded like, but he holds back. He wants to know what she has to say without his clarification.

“On your crappy couch?” she ventures eventually, one careful eyebrow raised.

“Or, you know – elsewhere.”

He holds his breath as he waits for her answer, even though he knows exactly which way she’s going to go.

“Jughead,” she says eventually, kindly. “I don’t regret what happened last night. But I don’t think that it should happen again, either.”

And that, he thinks, had been exactly what he’d thought she’d say, too.

“Got it,” he says, pulling the best smile he can muster across his face. She’s staring back down at her hands again, her fingertips almost fully folded over the band-aid he’d put on her earlier. “Why go down that road again when we’ve already walked it before, right?”

She’s slow to look back up at him, faltering once as she tries and fails to bring her eyes fully to his.

“Right,” she mumbles.

He supposes that the hesitation in her voice will have to be good enough to last his lifetime.

 

**_8:07 p.m._ **

When it falls dark – whether from the new night dawning or his hooded eyelids that he’s doing his best to keep open, he doesn’t know – Mary and Fred Andrews tell him to head on home and get some rest.

“Archie’s sleeping, Jughead,” they tell him, patting him comfortingly on his shoulder. “You should be, too.”

He considers the Andrews’ offer seriously because he doesn’t know that he’s been this thoroughly exhausted in his entire life. Every part of him is tired – he can barely move without feeling like he’s running a marathon, he can barely think without his head hammering back at him in response. He can barely feel without feeling much too much.

 _But_ , he thinks as he looks across Archie’s bed to Betty, legs pulled up to her chest and head cradled against her knees – _this is his eleventh hour with her_. This is his _Affair to Remember,_ this is his _Casablanca_.

In a perfect world, they’d knit themselves back together seamlessly, mending the rips and tears in the fabric of their friendship no matter how long ago they were created.

But in this world, he knows that’s unlikely to ever happen. They’re all so far from where they’ve come from now, and there are certain things, he thinks, that can never be brought back from the dead simply because too much life has gotten in the way.

This moment now is his for old time’s sake and he might as well make the most of it.

He knows it won’t last for much longer; the eleventh hour ends, just like everything else.

“I’m fine,” he says, looking over to her. He thinks she’s still the most beautiful woman he’s ever been in love with. “I’m good right here.”

 

**_10:52 p.m._ **

It happens quickly.

It all happens so quickly that he isn’t quite sure that it’s truly happening.

They’ve been listening so intently to the steady rhythm of Archie’s heart that when it falls and flats, none of them know how to react at first. There’s a moment, a missing heartbeat of a moment he thinks he’ll wonder about for the rest of his life if he could’ve done it differently, where he looks at Betty and at Fred and Mary Andrews, wide-eyed and unmoving.

He reacts first, jumping up and slapping his shaking palm over the emergency button, and he’s so grateful that he does if only because he doesn’t know that he could’ve lived and made peace with himself for the rest of his life if he’d walked away from all this knowing he’d wasted even a second more.

_Knock, knock._

“What’s happening?” he hears Betty ask shrilly as she scrambles to her feet.

He doesn’t know. But he knows it’s nothing good.

_Knock, knock._

Somewhere in the flurry of him pressing the emergency button over and over again, and over the screeching shriek of Betty’s strung together _oh my gods_ , he’s knocked out of the way by someone in a white coat towards the empty space at the foot of Archie’s bed. Unsteady on her feet, Betty crashes into his side, and he barely catches her before they both tumble hard against the wall.

_“Everyone needs to get out of here!”_

He can’t even see the face that yells over at them.

“I need to stay!” Betty screams, fighting her way back towards Archie’s side. _“I need to!”_

 _Do something_ , he thinks. _Do something, do something._

_Do anything._

“No, Betty, come on!” he tells her as she fights her way out of his grasp. He’s not a doctor and he’s not god – this is the best he can do. “Let them work! You’re in their way!”

“No, Jug! I need to-”

“Betty, stop! _Let them work!”_

He doesn’t know if it’s his tone or his hands on her shoulders, pushing her towards the door that convinces her that the best thing for both of them to do right now is to get the hell out of the way, but something does. In the firm circle of his arms that barely keep her upright, Betty falls limp, just enough for him to prop them both up against the window to Archie’s room.

“No,” she murmurs beside him. _“No, no, no, no, no.”_

“It’ll be okay,” he counters. “It’ll be okay.”

_Please god let it be okay._

“Oh god. Oh my god. No, no, no, no, no.”

“It’s okay,” he hears himself saying again. “It’s okay.”

“Why? Why is this happening? This isn’t-”

“-it’s okay. It’s going to be-”

“-no, no, no-”

“-it’ll be-”

“-Hail Mary full of grace.”

“What?”

“Blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.”

 _She’s praying_ , he realizes stupidly, _and not even correctly since she’s skipping over entire words and lines_. There’d been a time, a time long gone now that their families had dragged the younger versions of themselves to church every Sunday. It’d given way quickly to weekend soccer games and absent, fleeing mothers that’d been the only impetus they’d needed to go, so it’s no wonder that she’s saying it wrong now. He doesn’t even know if this is the right prayer for this moment, but he fills in what he can for her.

“Holy Mary Mother of God-”

 _“_ Pray for us sinners-”

“Now and at the hour of our death-”

 _“_ Amen-”

“Hail Mary full of grace, hail Mary full of grace-”

“The Lord is with thee-”

Knock, knock.

_No._

Knock, knock.

_No, please, no. Don’t._

I’m here.

_Fuck off._

I’m taking him with me.

_I said fuck off._

I’m here.

Knock, knock.

Knock, knock.

Knock.

_I’m here._

Then, silence.

 

**_10:52 pm_ **

Archie Andrews dies at 10:52 p.m., eight minutes before visiting hours end.

 

**_10:52 p.m._ **

His fingers, twisted and dug deeply into the fabric of her shirt, tremble and shake violently.

 

**_10:52 p.m._ **

He doesn’t breathe. She doesn’t either.

 

**_10:52 p.m._ **

No one does.

 

**_10:52 p.m._ **

Then they do.

There’s a stomach-turning, nightmare inducing cry from Fred Andrews as he covers his son’s body with his own, a shriek from Mary Andrews, and a blood curdling scream he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to shake from his mind and memory as Betty slips from the loose cradle of his arms and falls into a crouch on the ground. It rips and tears right from the back of her throat and it cuts through every other sound reverberating through the hospital, the indistinct chatter, the pagers he still doesn’t understand because he’d thought those had gone out of vogue ages ago.

Barely breathing, he falls to the ground beside her, curling his spine up against the wall – he doesn’t have the energy to stand right now.

She’s rocking back and forth with her hands clamped tightly over her ears, moaning, wailing something incomprehensible. The nurses and doctors are looking at him with what he thinks is a practiced kind of pity. They’ve seen this before, dozens too many times, and they know what’s just happened.

Now, she’s wheezing next to him, gulping in air by the mouthful, and he feels his own breath shorten as it inadvertently lines up with her fractured ones.

He can’t breathe.

He feels dizzy, like the world has been flipped entirely upside down.

And in a way, it has – for life to wrench away someone as good as Archie Andrews, there’s something distinctly and definitively upside down about it all.

He can’t breathe.

The floor is on the ceiling.

The ceiling is on the floor.

Nothing is standing or staying still.

There’s no air.

_Where the hell is the air?_

He can’t breathe.

He’s going to be sick.

The last realization hits him hard if only because he realizes somewhere in the back of his mind that if he doesn’t get up and move right now, he’s about to throw up all over Betty’s pink shoes.

The bows will be ruined.

He pushes himself up off the ground with one hand on her back for leverage and stumbles blindly on his broken, useless feet to the nearest bathroom.

Which happens to be a women’s bathroom, but it’s between that or him throwing up all over the hospital floor, so he pushes open the door, fumbling blindly for the handle, and just barely makes it to the trash before heaving out the entire contents of his stomach.

It’s the taste of death right in his mouth.

He can hear his heartbeat thumping in his own ears, pounding away at his temples.

Knock, knock.

Knock, knock.

 _I hate you,_ he thinks. _I could kill you if that weren’t already your job._

_I hate you so fucking much._

It’s in that very stupid, horrible moment, while hunched over a trash can in a women’s bathroom, that he starts thinking about all the days Archie will never get.

A wedding day.

A retirement day.

A thirty-first birthday, a fortieth birthday. Any future birthdays.

A day to die in his bed, old, croaking, and crotchety because he’s already died here tonight in an uncomfortable hospital bed at thirty.

Archie won’t be the best man at his wedding day now, either; there won’t be a day where he teaches a future Jones how to toss a football if they’re so inclined to want to learn. Jughead had always planned on writing off that parental duty to Archie because it’s not like he knows how to do something like that anyway.

He won’t be able to anymore.

He’ll never meet Archie’s future children because he won’t have any now, he won’t meet Archie’s future wife because even the potentiality of her no longer exists – she’s gone with the wind, and swept up away in death’s dark arms just like he is.

Sliding down the bathroom wall, Jughead knocks his head back against it once, then a second time for good measure because maybe he isn’t really here. Maybe none of this is really happening.

But it is.

With his head cradled between his hands, he finally allows himself to fracture, a singular crack that inevitably shatters him to his core.

The inhumane sound of his cries, sounds he’s never heard from himself before, echo hauntingly against the cold tile.

 

 

 


	5. Saturday, Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for this chapter - discussion of death and related themes, grief, and mourning.
> 
> All my thanks in the world to bugggghead for lending her amazing eyes and insight to this chapter.

 

_I can still hear you saying you would never break the chain._

**_8:00 a.m._ **

**Saturday - Day 10**

Her alarm chirps at her from her nightstand.

Immediately, she chalks it up as a mocking sound, alerting her to the day she’d never thought she’d have to face.

She’s always found comfort in coming home to her childhood room. There’s an ease that washes over her when she does, a familiarity that comes from feeling her old pink rug soft under her feet, a childlike sense of excitement that courses through her when she sits at her vanity again, gently sweeping blush over her cheeks as she remembers how a new day, a new date used to promise so much.

Once, there used to be a gentle calm that came from peeking out from behind the curtains to the window next door.

But today, there’s no comfort to be found within these four pink walls. There’s no ease or familiarity, and there’s no calm.

Today, there’s only dread.

Maybe if she lays here like this, nose buried under the same pink blankets and sheets she’d had in high school, it’ll force the rest of her life to fall back into that time, too. Archie will be alive and waving to her from his window as he gets ready for school, and Jughead will be at her door ready to walk her there safely.

She wants to go back. She wants more than anything to go back to how simple it had all been then.

She shuts off her alarm and closes her eyes.

 

**_8:30 a.m._ **

Her mother, blunt and self-assured as she’s always been, throws the door open at exactly half past.

“We’re going to be late, Elizabeth,” she’s told firmly. “It’s time to get up. Your dress is in the bathroom.”

“Can you not?” Betty snaps back, though it’s mild compared to what she really wants to say.

_Just fuck off._

At the very least, her mother has the decency to look confused. “Can I not what?”

“Sound like everything is okay when it isn’t. It’s pissing me off.”

She’s fully aware that she’s acting petulant and childish right now, but maybe she’s allowed that liberty within the confines of the room where she’d grown up.

And on this day, too.

“Don’t,” Betty says sharply as her mother begins pulling the curtain away from her window. A sliver of sunlight cuts across her pink carpet. “Just don’t touch that window.”

“It’s a beautiful day.”

And based on weather alone, she supposes it is. But on a grander level - “it’s a horrible day.”

Her mother sighs deeply before relenting and dropping the curtain.

“I wish you didn’t have to go through this alone, Elizabeth.”

Betty doesn’t know if she’s looking for it or if it’s actually there, but she finds the accusation to latch and jump on to regardless.

“You mean you wish that Trev were here with me.” _Stop it. Just stop it. There’s no need to be a bitch._

“I didn’t say that,” her mother defends. “I just want what’s best for you.”

“And you think that’s Trev? You think Trev’s what’s best for me?”

“Betty,” Alice Cooper sighs out, exasperated as she lets her hands slap to her sides. She’s always exasperated with her, she’s always disappointed. “I don’t know. If you don’t think that’s what’s best for you, then it’s not. I just want you to be happy. If moving on is what makes you happy, then that’s perfectly fine.”

“I had sex with Jughead,” she says flatly. “What do you think about that? How’s that for moving on, Mom? Having sex with a man who I haven’t seen in ten years because he broke my heart the last time I did?”

She can see the hurt on her mother’s face, it’s written there so plainly. She’d said a rude and spiteful thing - a true thing - but a rude and spiteful thing regardless just to do damage because she’s feeling sad today and damn if the whole world shouldn’t feel as sad as she does.

And her spite has finally landed.

“I steamed your dress,” her mother tells her, over her shoulder and one foot out her bedroom door. “So cross your ankles when you sit.”

 _Wrinkles_ , she thinks as the door falls shut. Her mother is worried about creases and wrinkles and appearances on a day like this.

But oddly, there is at least some comfort to be found in the predictability of it all.

 

**_9:19 a.m._ **

Betty feels her stomach twist and lurch as the family Volkswagen turns towards the cemetery’s entrance.

Instinctively, she dips her head below her knees to stop the single bite of toast from making a surprise appearance all over her lap.

 _See_ , she wants to say to her parents. _I told you I was better off not eating - don’t you think I know myself well enough by now to know that? I’m thirty. I’m an adult._

_I’m adult enough to have to go to my best friend’s funeral, so I can damn well decide whether or not I need to eat breakfast on a day like this._

They’d insisted, though, in what had been one of the only times in recent memory that her parents had agreed on anything at all.

“Honey?” her father calls back to her. “You okay?”

 _No_ , she thinks. _Of course I’m not._

“Yeah,” she whispers, bringing her head back up. “I’m just fine.”

 

**_9:21 a.m._ **

She sees him approaching from the other end of the cemetery, head to toe in black, save for the grey from his beanie. She’s attended a funeral or two with him before - his grandfather’s, Archie’s grandmother’s because the idea of a dead person that near to Archie had terrified him - but she’s never seen him in all black before. Various shades of black and blue, yes, but never all this.

 _He’d look imposing_ , she thinks, _if he didn’t look so broken._

She’s just about to break the silence and offer some kind of greeting on behalf of her family, but her mother beats her to the punch.

“Jughead,” Alice Cooper says haughtily, and that’s all she does before stalking off.

 

**_9:22 a.m._ **

Betty expects her father to be the one to hold his hand out first, but Jughead has always been one to surprise her.

“Mr. Cooper,” he says, hand extending across the divide.

And just like that, she’s sixteen again before the world turned ugly.

_I’ll have her home by eleven, Mr. Cooper._

_Don’t worry, Mr. Cooper, we’re just going to Pop’s._

_Mr. Cooper, I love your daughter and I’m going to keep dating her whether you like it or not._

“Jughead,” her father greets, shaking back. She doesn’t know that she’s ever seen her father shake his hand before. “It’s been a while.”

“It has,” he says simply.

Her father squeezes her arm once before gently removing it from the crook of his elbow. “I’ll give you both a moment.”

Then they both watch as his large and lumbering frame chases after her mother. She’s slow to bring her eyes to his, but his - she finds when he does - are already on her.

“Hi,” she says quietly. She looks like he hasn’t slept at all since she’d last saw him.

“Hi.”

 

**_9:23 a.m._ **

“Glad to see your mom still doesn’t like me.”

“Oh,” Betty says slowly. “It really has nothing to do with you.”

_And everything to do with me._

“You look nice,” he tells her. “I mean, you look terrible but you’re beautiful.”

She forgets sometimes that this person in front of her not only knows her but knows how to say the right things to her, too. It isn’t that she minds being told she’s beautiful - on the contrary, it’s a nice, wonderful, sweet thing to hear even on a day like this.

But the day-like-this caveat is precisely why she loves the fact that he told her she looks terrible. She feels terrible. She hasn’t eaten in a week, she’s slept fitfully and unsoundly, and her eyes are barely visible under her heavy, swollen eyelids.

There’s a distinct sallowness to her skin and gaunt to her frame. There’s a certain kind of sickliness she’s wearing today, but these are all marks and honors she carries with her proudly. She looks terrible today _for_ Archie and _because_ of Archie and that’s a badge of pride.

She looks terrible; she knows that. But she’s glad that he knows it, too.

“You look terrible, too,” she offers back, almost shyly. He almost smiles. “How’ve you been?”

He simply shakes his head. “You?”

“I have to give an eulogy,” she tells him. “Fred asked. He said that you didn’t want to.”

He drops his head low in embarrassment, she thinks, or maybe shame. “I told him that I couldn’t. I just – I don’t know how to write something like this. I didn’t mean for it to fall on you.”

“I figured that one of us should,” she mumbles. “Say something, I mean.”

“You ready?” he asks, but so kindly, so softly.

She’s always thought that his voice sounds beautiful at this exact timbre; it’s almost melodic when he speaks like this. It’s like music.

Or maybe, it’s just her brand of music.

“No,” she whispers back, balking at the hoarseness in her own voice. “I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for this.”

 

**_9:26 a.m._ **

She stops dead in her tracks when she sees it.

The big It. The Last It.

The simple, polished oak box that Archie will lie in for the rest of time.

Her first thought is that she hopes it’s comfortable in there for him. The second is that she hopes that wherever he is, he isn’t scared. She hopes so much that he isn’t scared.

 _But how can he not be,_ she wonders. It’s dark in there and he’s alone. It’s cold beneath the ground and Archie had always loved the warmth. If in her young life Jughead was her earth, the one who kept her tethered and grounded, then Archie was her sun - warm and bright, spirit as fiery and vibrant as his hair.

“Betty?” she hears Jughead call back to her; she hadn’t realized he’d moved a few paces ahead of her.

“Huh?” Her breath feels caught in her throat.

“It’s about to start,” he tells her, but gently, almost as if he’s afraid she’s about to go running for the hills. Or at the very least out and far away from the cemetery.

She tries to move forward but her feet stay rooted in place, both literally and figuratively - the sharp point of her heels have dug and sunk into the grass as she’s stood there staring.

“Come on,” he says to her quietly, doubling back and extending his arm out to her. “We should go sit down.”

With shaking limbs, she covers the sharp point of his elbow with her hand and just barely curls her fingers around his arm.

 

**_9:27 a.m._ **

He leads her to the seat her parents have saved for her.

She’s about to chastise both of them, looking up at her with twin blank faces for conveniently forgetting to throw a sweater or purse over a seat for Jughead, too; convenient, because she just _knows_ her parents think about things like this. She wants to tell them that whatever grudge they’re holding against him for breaking her heart and leaving her high and dry ten years ago is frankly unnecessary, and moreover, entirely her business.

But he simply nods once in her parents’ direction before moving to the first row of seats and taking his place next to Mary and Fred Andrews.

She can’t see their faces and for that, she’s beyond thankful. She doesn’t think she would hold it together if she could. She’s never seen Fred look anything less than kindly and fatherly, and she’s never seen Mary look anything less than perfectly put together.

She doesn’t want to see them cry. That will only end in her crying, too.

As the crowd settles into silence, she finds herself wishing that it were him next to her instead of her mother.

But he’s taken his rightful place there next to the Andrews’ and for that, she’s proud of him - the second son so harshly and prematurely turned into the only.

 

**_9:30 a.m._ **

There’s a priest or a pastor or a reverend who steps in front of the crowd at half past nine on the dot, and all she can think is that she doesn’t know the difference between any of them.

But she can’t bring herself to care.

“We’re here today,” the unknown, unnamed man starts, clearing his throat loudly into the microphone. “We’re here in memory of the life of Archibald Frederick Andrews.”

She doesn’t often fail to pay attention or much less zone out, but today, she can’t help it. She doesn’t like the cold, rote words that are being offered up about Archie now, and she doesn’t care to pray Archie’s way into death either.

It’s not how she wants to remember him. It’s not how she _does_ remember him.

 _The oldest memory of Archie,_ she instructs herself.

_The most loving memory of Archie._

_The best fifth grade memory, the best ninth grade memory of Archie._

This is how she wants to remember him.

 

**_9:36 a.m._ **

A bird chirps over her head and for a moment, she thinks about whipping her clutch in its direction. Not directly at it, she wouldn’t do that, but near enough so that it gets the message to get the hell out of her vicinity.

It’s too happy and she doesn’t want to see that right now.

 

**_9:40 a.m._ **

There’s a patch of grass, probably no larger than her hand, that’s slightly taller than the rest.

 _The lawn mower must have inadvertently skipped over that part_.

She decides that she likes the imperfection.

 

**_9:43 a.m._ **

With lightly flapping wings, the bird that earned her ire swoops down gently onto the patch of unmowed grass. It’s a small, brown thing, nondescript and completely ordinary, but sweet. Still so sweet.

It turns to face her. She thinks it might even be looking right at her.

She wonders in the grand scheme of things what that means.

 

**_9:44 a.m._ **

She wonders in the grand scheme of things what any of it means.

 

**_9:45 a.m._ **

Life - her life, Jughead’s life, the bird’s life - it all ends in the same way.

 

**_9:47 a.m._ **

Just like that, without rhyme, reason, or warning, the bird flies away.

 

**_9:53 a.m._ **

She’s jolted out of her trance when her father shakes her arm.

“What are you-oh,” she says as he jerks his chin in the direction of the podium.

“Just stay calm, honey,” her father instructs, whispering lowly. “It’ll be okay.”

Even with the prompts and cues, it still doesn’t register that it’s her turn to speak until everyone else twists and peers over to her.

“Oh,” she repeats again, brushing down the back of her dress as she rises to her feet slowly. _Wrinkles_ , Betty, she can hear her mother thinking. _Wrinkles_.

She wrestles the small stack of notecards from her clutch before crossing the distance slowly, stumbling twice as her heels sink and catch in the soft ground. Staring straight ahead and not on the eyes that she feels tracking her every movement, she swallows down bile and that stupidly unnecessary bite of toast with each step as she moves closer and closer to Archie.

Archie in the box.

 _It’s just Archie_ , she reminds herself. _It’s always still just Archie. It’s just Archie in a really nice box he can’t get out of._

_It’s Archie._

_It’s just Archie._

_Oh god, it’s Archie._

With trembling hands that she fists and curls into themselves, she turns to face the huddled masses she can’t bring herself to look directly at. Their grieving and their crying – it’s all much too much.

She looks down at the notecards she stacks in a neat line across the slanted space.

Then, she looks up past them to the uneven, fuzzy line of the tree tops.

“I’m Betty Cooper,” she says shakily in a voice she doesn’t yet recognize as her own. “And I was one of Archie’s best friends.”

 

**_9:54 a.m._ **

She stares straight at the sun until her vision is nothing but streaks and spots.

“It’s a beautiful day,” Betty starts slowly as she builds up to her voice. If nothing else, she wants to sound like herself when she’s saying this. “It’s strange for me to talk about how beautiful a day today is, isn’t it? I know today is a horrible day, I know that. Today is one of the worst days of my life. It _is_ the worst day of my life. But this is the kind of day that Archie would’ve loved. He loved sunny days like these. That was the thing about Archie. He was just... Archie was bright, in every single possible way. When he smiled, he’d smile so widely and so genuinely that you couldn’t help but smile, too. He made everything bright. He made my life bright."

She sets her hands on the side of the podium. _Stop shaking. Stop it._

_You’re fine._

“So, it’s a beautiful day. It’s horrible but it’s beautiful, and Archie would’ve loved it. That’s why I thought it was worth mentioning.”

She looks down at her notes; her handwriting has always been neat, but it might as well be written in another language right now.

“You know,” Betty says slowly, swiping the cards together and gathering them up. “I told Mr. Andrews that I’d write this speech – this... this _eulogy_. But honestly, I didn’t.”

She looks over to Jughead then, because even as she directs her gaze away from the crowd, she can see how quickly his face changes out of the corner of her eye. It wipes over with shock, and his eyes that had turned down into his lap swing up to her as he leans forward with his hand poised over his knee.

She knows that look. When he looks at her like that, he looks like he’s twenty again. He looks just like he had before life had the chance to do horrible things to him. He looks at her with all the care in the world.

He looks the way he did when he loved her and when she loved him.

 _Are you okay,_ she thinks she reads from him.

She turns her attention back to her unkempt notes.

“This?” she says, flipping through the cards as she speaks. “This isn’t a speech. When I was driving down to see Archie, I played this game with myself – all the memories I had of Archie. That’s what these are – these are just memories. This one,” she says, holding up a single notecard to the crowd. “This is the happiest memory I have of Archie. This? The funniest. These are just pieces of paper filled with memories. That was the best I could do. Because how do you write a speech for your best friend’s funeral? What can you possibly say that’s right?” she asks, letting the scraps of useless paper fall from her hands to scatter across the podium. “How do you do this? I don’t have anything pretty to say. I don’t have anything profound to say because I just don’t know how to. All I have are these.” She inhales deeply in an effort to control the voice she feels quickly spiralling out of control.

“This is my favorite,” Betty says, shaking out the notecard and placing it on top of the others. “We were ten. It seems like a lifetime ago now – _ten_. Back then, I... I-”

She breaks her promise to herself and looks out to the crowd.

They’re all looking right at her. So much sadness, so much sorrow and nothing she can do to make any of it better for anyone.

“Back then I,” she repeats, clearing her throat. “I... I-”

They’re all looking at her. They’re all waiting for her.

 _It’s so easy_ , she thinks. _Just say something nice about Archie – god and everyone else knows that there’s so much to say on that. Tell everyone how much you loved him. Tell everyone how much he meant to you._

“I don’t want to be here.”

She huffs in a wheezing gulp of air, one that doesn’t seem to be close to enough to cure the way the world spins madly around. Her words, her staccatoed breathing all echo loudly through the microphone.

“I don’t want to be here.” She closes her eyes in an effort to keep her tears firmly in check, balancing her head in the cradle of her palms.  

_It’s so easy._

“I don’t want to be here.”

_Anyone could do this._

“I don’t want to be here.”

_Archie would do this for you._

“I don’t want to be here,” she whispers, but it comes out louder than that. Her palms are wet. Her wrists are wet. The notecards in her hands are wet. “I don’t want to be here.”

“Betty, stop.”

“I don’t want to be here,” she repeats over and over again to herself as she bats away the hands that try to turn her from the podium. If she keeps saying it, she doesn’t have to listen or hear anything else. “I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to-”

“Hey, Betts, come on. Hey! It’s just me.”

She can feel his hand close around her forearm firmly, and when she turns her wrist and circles his arm back in return, she knows exactly who’s holding her steady. She knows that line of muscle under her forefinger, she knows the measure of distance between her thumb and ring finger, she knows the pulse under her thumb.

It’s him - she knows it’s him.

“Sorry,” she hears Jughead say into the microphone. “We just – we need a moment.”

Then, he turns back to her and even with her eyes firmly shut, she knows he’s standing between her and the crowd she can’t face.

“I have to do this,” Betty says. Her forehead is pressed right into one of his shirt buttons; it’ll most definitely leave an unseemly, indented mark on her head for everyone to see. “Someone needs to say nice things about Archie right now.”

“I know.”

“I have to do this.”

How, though, she has no idea.

“Shh,” he whispers over to her, and when he starts rubbing small but purposeful circles on her back, all she can think is that he’s already doing better than he’d done for her when she’d cried at the hospital.

The hospital where Archie died.

“Shh,” he whispers again. No words, no condolences, no _‘it’s okay, Betty’_ because she figures that he knows that it’s not. “Shh.”

“I can’t do this,” she mumbles back to him, hiccupping over her words. She isn’t defeated often, but she knows when she is. And she knows when to admit to it. “Jug, I can’t do this.”

“Okay,” he says slowly. “That’s okay. You don’t have to. Can I see these?”

“Here,” she says forcefully, shoving away the shuffled stack of notes from her hands to his. “Take them. I don’t want to look at these. I _can’t_ look at any of this right now.”

“I know. So don’t look. Hey,” Jughead commands, with a hand on her cheek that draws her attention back to his voice. “Don’t look at everyone else out there. Don’t look at your parents and don’t look at Fred and Mary. Don’t look at Archie. Just look at me, okay? Just look at me. I’ll be right here.”

He’s being so kind to her and she doesn’t know that she deserves any of it. She’s here making a scene. She’s putting him between a rock and a hard place. She’s being difficult. She wants to go back to her seat and curl up in her mother’s lap even though she’s still so angry with her.

 _But you can’t leave him alone up here,_ she thinks. _Archie was his best friend, but he was yours, too. This is both your responsibility._

_This cross is for both of you to bear._

“Okay,” she whispers.

She opens her eyes and looks at only on him.

 

**_10:00 a.m._ **

She takes her place to his right-hand side at the podium.

“Hi,” he says, breathing out unsteadily into the microphone as he does. There’s a part of her that feels guilty, incredibly guilty for shoving him up into the limelight like this when he’d wanted to avoid it.

But she can’t do this right now, and if he’s willing to help – she’ll take it.

“I’m Jughead,” he says shakily, “Jones. But most of you know that. Or maybe you don’t, maybe you don’t remember. I - I know I haven’t been home in a while.”

She watches as he looks down to the notecard and as the most fleeting of half-smiles crosses his face before disappearing back into impassiveness.

“I’m going to be taking over for Betty, if that’s okay. I’m glad she picked this memory, though. I remember it,” he says. “Like it was yesterday. It’s one of my favorites, too.”

He’s facing the mourners but there’s a part of her that feels like he might just be talking only to her.

 

**_10:02 a.m._ **

He builds to the zenith of his voice slowly; like her, it takes him a while to find his.

“Back when we were ten, Archie, Betty, and I used to play down by Sweetwater River during the summer, on days a lot like this one, actually. A lot of you might remember that about us – I know we were loud; we were told that a lot. Honestly, we were kind of proud of it. There was this one day, though - I remember it so well. Betty made these friendship bracelets. They were daisies, I think.” When he looks over to her for confirmation, all she can manage is a simple nod. “They were these beautiful flower chains, woven together like something out of a poem. Or a fairytale.”

He pauses, inhaling so greatly that his shoulders visibly rise and fall as he does. “You know, I think we have the tendency sometimes to look back on childhood with a clouded sense of idyll. We think back on it as something more beautiful than it actually was. We romanticize it and we yearn for the simplicity and ease of it all; we remember it more beautifully than it actually was. Sometimes. I know that I do.” He pauses then, his eyes quickly darting over to her.

She looks squarely back at him.

 _Keep going,_ she hopes she’s telling him. _You know this memory as well as I do._

“But I don’t think that’s true of this day,” he says. “I had my friends by my side, I had the sun on my shoulders – I had nothing at all to worry about. This day,” he says, bringing up his hands to grasp onto either side of the podium like she’d done earlier to steady herself. “This day was perfect.”

She watches his throat work and his shoulder blades tense and stiffen under his pressed black jacket. It’s such a horrible, nothing color: black. It’s the absence of color, a void that sucks into it everything bright and wonderful, spitting back out nothing at all.

“Archie put his on without hesitating once. I wish I could say the same. You know, they tell you to never look a gift horse in the mouth, but what did I know at ten? Archie knew, though – he knew what friendship meant even back then when I had no idea myself. And up until the end, Archie never disappointed me – he was always there when I needed him, when I didn’t even know that I needed him. His friendship never once wavered. I couldn’t have asked for a better friend than him. He’d never let you down, even if you so often did. Archie was loyal in every sense of the word.”

She watches, mesmerized in heart-thumping, throat-closing horror as he runs his hand over his head and tugs his beanie off. Every part of her wants so much to reach out a hand to stop him when he does; she knows what he’s about to do.

“I’ll never have another friend like him,” Jughead says as his hands grip tightly at the knitted fabric. “He was my best friend. He still is – that will never change. Archie will always be my best friend. He’ll always be a brother to me, wherever he is. Wherever I am. He wasn’t here for long enough. But Betty’s right, too – she always is. Wherever Archie went and whatever he did, he made everyone’s day and everyone’s life better. He made my life brighter. I’ll miss that about him.”

When she hears his voice crack over his words, her hand draws up instinctively to the space between his hunched shoulder blades.

He doesn’t look to her, but under her fingertips she can feel the slow unfold of his knotted muscles.

“But more than that,” Jughead continues. “I’ll just miss him for the rest of my life.”

She doesn’t realize that she’s holding her breath until the world around her begins looking dim at the edges. It’s like a train wreck, it’s like her parents fighting – she hates it, but she can’t stop listening to it. She can’t stop watching it.

He fists his hand tightly into the fabric as he crosses the distance between the podium and Archie.

 _Haven’t you lost enough_ , she thinks frantically as he does. She wants so much to jump in front of him and march him straight back to his seat. _Haven’t we all lost enough? You don’t need to lose more – you don’t need to lose who you are._

 _But,_ she argues with herself. _They’ve all lost at least a part of who they are. They’re all burying a part of themselves with Archie today._

_What’s one more?_

He bows his head low as he faces the coffin, then reaches his hand out slowly, whispering something quietly as does. From where she’s standing, Betty hears only the sharp corners of his words.

_“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”_

There’s an intimacy to his words – the band of brothers – not band of sisters and brothers or band of best friends, that immediately signifies to her that this moment now has nothing to do with her. Other moments may include her, but this one doesn’t.

She doesn’t need or want to know what else he’s saying to Archie.

This is his grief and his goodbye. This is his best friend and brother. She has and had her moments with Archie, but this is theirs, not hers.

She steps to the side out of earshot, and with her head bowed down low, she watches out of her periphery as his mouth rounds and curves over the words she thankfully and blissfully can’t make out.

Then, with hands that she swears she can see bleed and break, he gently places his hat on top of the polished wood.

His black hair catches in the sunlight as he returns to her side without it.

 

**_11:01 a.m._ **

She’s been sitting on the couch with an empty plate balancing on her lap and thanking everyone for their condolences for the past half hour.

There’s a part of her that feels like it’s undeserved. She can see right in her line of vision, Mary and Fred Andrews pallid-faced and nodding tightly at each person that holds out their hands to them. If anyone deserves the _‘I’m so sorry’s’_ she’s getting now, it’s the Andrews.

She does her best to avoid looking at them, at anyone.

 

**_11:17 a.m._ **

Instead, she watches him.

He’s been drinking – she’s seen him circle back to the bar at least twice.

He’s never been a drinker. They’d never talked too much about it because they never had to – alcohol got his family into its unfortunate state and he’d be damned if he’d be just another line in the sad, sorry Book of Jones.

She doesn’t know all that much about how he lives his life now, but she’d be willing to wager that he still isn’t a drinker. From what she’d seen of his apartment, there still isn’t any beer in the fridge, and there still aren’t any liquor bottles siphoned away in his kitchen cabinets.

But, she figures as she watches him tip out a finger of amber liquid into his glass, it’s okay that he’s a drinker on a day like this.

 

**_11:31 a.m._ **

Betty runs into him when his hand bumps hers reaching for the same plain dinner roll. She can’t stomach more than that right now.

She’d been looking down – it’s hard for her to to look up right now at all the spaces that Archie had once lived in and loved, and her fingers knock into his.

“Sorry,” she says, pushing the roll in his direction. “I didn’t really want it.”

“Take it,” he says, tapping it back. “I didn’t either. I’m just tired of everyone asking me to eat. Honestly, I was just going to hold onto it.”

“Then by all means,” Betty says.

They both turn away from it.

“Jug,” she starts, laying her fingertips on his arm to draw his attention. “I just wanted to-“

“Betty?”

She whips around at the sing-song voice that hasn’t changed at all in twelve years.

“Veronica,” she greets, tapping her fingers awkwardly on Veronica’s shoulders when she moves in immediately for a hug that Betty hadn’t anticipated. “I didn’t know you were here.”

“I was standing in the back,” Veronica explains, throwing her lace covered arms around Jughead before he has the chance to step away. “My flight got in late. Jughead, hi.”

It’s a perfectly reasonable answer and it’s one that in no way should piss her off. She knows as well as the rest that it’s anyone’s game when it comes to travel, and that it’s not Veronica’s fault that she fell victim to it.

But Veronica is standing here in a black lace dress Betty thinks is entirely inappropriate for the occasion, face fully made up, eyelashes curled, and mascara still where it should be, unlike hers dotting her cheeks like freckles.

And, her hair is too perfect. It’s too shiny.

 _Veronica looks too put together for a day like this,_ Betty decides. _She doesn’t look broken enough. She’d spent time curling and coiffing her hair instead of mourning for Archie._

_What wasted time._

She has half a mind to turn Veronica and her calfskin pumps right out the Andrews’ door. Veronica can go back to where she came from as far as she’s concerned.

Next to her, Jughead nods once in her direction before swiftly moving past Veronica without so much as sparing her a glance. She admires his gall - no matter the situation, she doesn’t think she could ever walk away from someone that dismissively, but she understands why he does it because she wants to herself.

There’s no point in making idle conversation with Veronica now. Nothing they say in the next five or ten minutes will matter at all beyond that.

 _Why even expend energy at the pretense,_ Betty wonders.

“I didn’t know that you and Jughead were still together,” Veronica starts.

“We’re not.”

“Oh,” Veronica says. “I just thought earlier-”

“We’re not,” Betty repeats forcefully. “We’re just-”

 _What the hell are we,_ she asks herself. He’s definitely not her boyfriend anymore; she doesn’t even know if plain old friend is the right way to define what they are. But after everything they’ve been through in the past ten days, she doesn’t know that she can bring herself to just write him off as her ‘just nothing’ either, or as some fragment of her past she’d once loved.

There has to be a way to describe people like them, dealing with what they are now.

“We’re just getting through this,” Betty concludes.

“But you’re still in love with him,” Veronica presses, not so much a question as it is a fact.

“We’re just getting through this.”

Veronica nods slowly and disingenuously. _She doesn’t believe her_ , Betty can tell.

 _Well, she doesn’t have to – that’s entirely Veronica’s prerogative._ She doesn’t even know why Veronica is here. She doesn’t even know if Archie would want her here.

“How’ve you been?” Betty asks.

“Good!” The underpinned optimism in Veronica’s voice throws her for a loop. “I just got married actually, to the son of one of Daddy’s associates. We’re in California now. San Francisco.”

“Oh,” Betty says for lack of anything better. She wonders if she could care less about this conversation. “That’s nice. I hear it’s sunny there. Congratulations.”

Veronica’s eyes widen suddenly, followed by a quick hand that finds its way to Betty’s arm. “I would’ve invited you, B,” she says. Betty flinches at the old nickname. “But it was a small wedding. Family only, you know?”

Betty doubts that’s true but she nods along. “Of course,” she says. “I understand.”

“What about you, B?”

That nickname again. She doesn’t know why she’d found it so endearing back then.

“I’m not married,” she says.

“Oh,” Veronica says, with the all sympathy Betty’s just so tired of. “Well, you’ll get there. And I hear you’re doing well in Providence!”

“As well as I can be.”

They fall into silence then, an incredibly heavy and palpable silence that she feels every second of. As she scans the room quickly in the vain hope of finding something or someone to talk about, she sees her father and Jughead talking quietly in a far-off corner. There’s a moment, a fleeting one that she wonders if she’s imagining, where she catches her father lay a gentle hand on the younger man’s shoulder.

What she wouldn’t have given for this exact moment ten, twelve years ago, she thinks. The promise of a one day wholesome and happy family.

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Veronica offers eventually. “What happened to Archie.”

“It is.”

“Do you know what happened? I just know about the car accident.”

 _Yeah, I do,_ she thinks. _I know what happened because I was there._

_And you weren’t._

“There was a blood clot from his incision,” Betty recites. She’s said it so many times already to the hushed whispers who didn’t know who else to ask but her. What’s one more? “He had a stroke. They said there was nothing that anyone could’ve done.”

Veronica shakes her head slowly, perfect curls bouncing on her shoulders. “It’s chilling, isn’t it? We have all this technology now and something like this can still happen.”

“Yeah. It really is.”

Betty knows Veronica is trying; the right thing for her to do is to try in return. But Veronica hasn’t tried in twelve years beyond the errant happy birthday text every few years, and she doesn’t see that changing anytime soon because of anything she’s saying now.

And it’s not all on Veronica, Betty thinks. She hasn’t tried beyond the _happy-birthday-hope-you’re-well_ text, either. Friendship is a two way street and she’s old enough to admit and acknowledge that she hasn’t done much by way of walking down that road for Veronica in a long time now.

“There’s Cheryl,” Veronica says helplessly, nodding in the redhead's direction. “We should catch up soon, Betty. I’ll call you?”

“I’d like that,” Betty says. She doesn’t even try to mask the utter blankness in her voice.

Veronica smiles at her, tight lipped, almost pained before stalking off.

They both know she’ll never call.

 

**_11:41 a.m._ **

Betty meanders over to the bar. She sees him, standing off in a corner by himself, but she doesn’t think that now is the time to fuel the fire of gossip they’d inadvertently started earlier.

She’s sure that there’s already enough talk going around as it is.

“How’re you holding up, kiddo?” her dad asks her as she steps up quietly next to the only person she knows crowding around the liquor bottles.

She shakes her head. “I want to go home.”

“Just one second at a time, Betty,” he tells her. Instinctively, she twists and shields her father from the line of sight when he reaches over the bar. She doesn’t even know why she does that – she’s been old enough to drink for years now, but in the eyes of so many that still see her as a child, she supposes it’ll always feel taboo. “You can do this. There’s never been anything you haven’t been able to do yet. Here,” he father says, setting the glass in front of her. “You look like you could use it.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Betty,” he tells her plainly. “Days like these are made for more than water and white wine. Save that for your mom’s linguini nights. Days like these are for bourbon and rye.”

“Like the song?”

“Whiskey and rye,” her father corrects gently.

Betty loves her father but there’s never been much she’s connected with him on other than her ability to distinguish a Phillips head from a wrench; it’s a poorly kept secret in her family that everyone had been hoping she’d be a boy.

So she brings the glass to her lips and sips healthily – there’ve been enough sons lost today. There’s no need to bring up the memory of one more.

“What were you and Jughead talking about?” she asks, holding back a gag.

“Nothing.”

“Dad.”

“I said it was nice to see him. And that I appreciated what he said about Archie at the funeral.”

“You mean that you appreciated what he did for me.”

Her father nods, sipping slowly from his glass. “I did.”

“You never did like him,” she says, but without malice; only with fond, if not distant memory.

“Don’t take it personally, honey, but I’ve never liked any of your boyfriends.”

She knows. “Who’d you like the least?”

“Trevor. You were the least happy with him.”

“Good thing I didn’t marry him then. Who’d you like the most?”

Her father sips again before answering. “I was just talking to him.”

That, however, _does_ surprise her. She’d thought it’d be Adam and his multi-colored polo collection, hands down. “Really? Why?”

“For the same reason I didn’t like Trevor. You were happiest when you were with him.”

She matches her dad’s sip with one of her own, holding her face steady through the sting burning its way down her throat. She doesn’t understand how all the men seem to be enjoying this.

But then again, she thinks, looking up at Mary and Fred Andrews, maybe it’s not about enjoyment on a day like this. Maybe it’s just about the pain.

“Dad,” she says quietly, drawing her gaze away from the Andrews. She can’t look at them for more than mere seconds right now; she doesn’t know why, but she feels like she might do something crazy if she does. “I’m sad. I can’t stop being sad. I’m just – Dad, I’m so sad.”

“I know, Betty.”

“I’m sad for myself. I miss Archie. And I’m sad for everyone else, too. I’m sad for everyone who’s going to miss Archie.”

“You can be sad, honey. You should be,” her dad tells her in all his great simplicity.

“I’m sad for them,” she continues, looking over to the Andrews for just long enough to make her point. “I think about them and what they’re going through and I just want to give up. I want to cry.”

Her father nods slowly, looking up briefly to the stoic Andrews before turning back to his glass. “I don’t know how they’re doing this,” he tells her quietly, bringing a heavy arm around her. “If it were me-”

Her dad sighs then, his big shoulders rocking and heaving with his great exhale.

“Don’t ever make that me, okay, kiddo?”

She can count the number of times on one hand she’s ever heard her father brush even the borders of emotional; she’s not used to it at all. Her mother is expressive – she’s big and loud – but there’s a quiet strength to her father that so very rarely cracks and falters.

It chills her to her core and breaks her heart all at once that it does now.

“I won’t, Dad,” she whispers back, tilting her head onto her father’s shoulder. “I promise.”

 

**_11:57 a.m._ **

She doesn’t know what else to do with herself – she isn’t hungry and she’s beyond tired of mingling – so she makes herself useful in the kitchen by stacking the dishwasher.

And in a way, it’s nice to feel useful, even if in this tiny, infinitesimal way. Any help she can lend the Andrews now is one thing less they’ll have to do later. It’s one more minute they can spend remembering Archie instead of worrying about whether or not there’s clean silverware.

“The hard soap will ruin your hands, Elizabeth.”

She breathes in deeply from the weak trail of steam rising up from the tap before turning to face her mother.

“I’m sorry I made a scene at the funeral and embarrassed you,” Betty says flatly. She doesn’t mean it, not really, but she figures it’s what her mother wants to hear.

“You always assume the worst of me,” her mother tells her. “What did I do to deserve that?”

 _She sounds so sad,_ Betty thinks. _And all because of me._

“I’m sorry,” Betty says quietly. “I’m just – I’m sorry.”

Her mother neither nods nor accepts her apology verbally, but simply throws a dish towel over Betty’s hands and elbows her gently out of the way, taking her place in front of the sink.

“Mom, I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing with my life sometimes,” Betty says, wiping her hands slowly before placing the towel back on the counter neatly. “I feel like I’m just going through the motions sometimes. Did you ever feel like that?”

She watches her mother’s hands work methodically over the dishes, tipping and tilting them under the water. “I think everyone does, Betty. It’s as much a part of life as death is.”

Betty exhales, feeling a weight she hadn’t known she’d been shouldering, slip and slide off her back.

“What did you do about it?” she asks quietly.

Her mother looks at her briefly before turning back to the dishes.

“I started working at the Register again with your father,” her mom says. “Betty, I love you and Polly, but it wasn’t enough for me to stay home and just be your mom all day long. And I didn’t know that it was okay to say that and to do this thing for myself in this town. But it’s what made me happy, and at the end of the day, I thought that’s how I could be your mom best; by juggling both, by showing you girls how to be happy.”

“I never knew that,” Betty says slowly.

_And I should have._

“I don’t know if that was the right thing to do, but it’s what I thought was best.”

“It was,” Betty offers. “It was what was best and what was right.”

Her mother looks over to her, eyes slightly narrowed in careful consideration, and Betty wonders then if she might be seeing something different. She’s looking at her so intently.

“Elizabeth, you have to find what makes you happy. Look at where we are now – life is too short not to be. And you have to find the person who makes you happy, too. I meant what I said, Betty – all I want is for you to be happy. You can choose to believe that or not.”

“Mom, of course I believe you.” She holds out her hand in a wordless offering of her help. The very least she can do is help stack the dishes while her mother rinses. “What if Jughead is the person who makes me happy?”

She expects her mother to throw over a look of shock or surprise, but she doesn’t. “Is he?” she asks simply.

Betty frowns and spends longer than necessary bent over the dishwasher, rearranging the dishes that others have haphazardly thrown in.

“I don’t know,” Betty murmurs back eventually. “But I feel when I’m with him, Mom. More than I have in a while. He still makes me angry sometimes. But he makes me happy, too. It feels like I know myself a little more when I’m with him. I forgot how nice it is to have someone who knows not just who I am, but where I come from, too.” She inhales deeply, building up to the words she doesn’t know whether or not are right to share with her mother. “He makes me feel. All kinds of things. Mom, he makes me feel alive again.”

She looks at her mom expectantly, feeling her heart thump quicker with each long second. She doesn’t need her parents’ permission or blessing for anything within the scope of her love life, but what she needs and what she wants are two entirely different things.

And at the end of the day, she’ll always want her mother’s approval. That’s simply the child in her, the child that will always look to her parents, no matter her age.

“Elizabeth,” her mom tells her slowly. “You’ve both lost a lot – I know how much Archie meant to you. To both of you. You’re both going through a lot right now, and you will be for some time. Just be careful with whatever it is you both choose to do.”

“Oh.” She can feel red boiling and circling on her face from embarrassment.

“But,” Alice interrupts, “No one knows better than him what you’re going through right now. And I don’t think anyone has ever loved you the way he loves you, either. So maybe he deserves to hear the things you’ve just told me.”

Betty looks at her mother then, at the faint lines and creases she sees at her eyes, her forehead – all the telltale signs of age she’s never wanted to see on her parents. She’s always wanted this moment – for her mother to talk to her as a woman and not as a child – but she’s forgotten that honor comes with a cost.

 _Time_ , she thinks, is something she’s never seen as an expense or a privilege before. _But it is._

“Mom, I’m sorry I wasn’t home last Christmas,” Betty says, clearing her way through the heaviness lodged her throat.

Her mother smiles at her, secretly and privately because she knows as well as anyone else that this isn’t the time or place to be smiling. “You’ll be home this year,” she says simply.

And that is more than enough to right her world again, even if only a little.

 

**_12:17 p.m._ **

She’s sitting on the couch again, turning a dinner roll in her hand idly when she sees him quickly slip up the stairs.

Her first instinct is to follow hot on his heels; she’s been looking for a minute alone with him, without the eyes and without the judgment the entire morning has brought, and this is likely the best chance she’ll get.

But she knows just how much she wants to get away from it all right now, and if he’s anything like her, and she knows that he is, he likely wants the reprieve, too.

She continues turning the bread over and over again in her hands.

 

**_12:22 p.m._ **

At the five-minute mark, she tosses the dinner roll into the large faux snake plant Fred Andrews keeps by the bay window and scans the room quickly before following him up the stairs.

 

**_12:23 p.m._ **

Her hand stills nervously over the door to Archie’s room.

She holds her breath as she turns the knob.

 

**_12:24 p.m._ **

“Thank you,” she says, leaning back against the door and pushing it shut. There’s a nauseating, dizzying sense of déjà vu that hits her when she sees him sitting on the side of Archie’s bed, but this time without Archie there, too.

His head turns to her sharply at her voice and his hair, without the beanie holding it in place, swoops and swings across his eyes.

“Hey,” he says, tiredly, gently. “For what?”

“For doing what I couldn’t.”

“It was my fault you were up there in the first place,” Jughead says. “Least I could do.”

“You always did have my back,” she says.

At the bed, she sits down next to him, the silk of her black dress brushing against the fabric of his black suit.

It’s a horrible color, she thinks again.

It’s a horrible, terrible color.

“Nothing about this really feels real, does it?”

He shrugs against her. “I don’t know what this feels like. It’s the most real anything has ever felt. And it feels like a dream, too.”

 _No_ , she thinks – _this feels like a nightmare_.

“I didn’t know you remembered that day.”

“There’s a lot I remember,” he says simply. “How’s Veronica?”

Betty shrugs. “I don’t know.” And in a way, she really doesn’t. She knows the bare bones, facts, the unimportant details and trimmings she might learn from one quick look through Veronica’s purse, but she has no idea how Veronica really is. “She’s married,” Betty offers eventually. “Some trust fund guy.”

“Predictable.”

“Isn’t it?”

He looks over at her then with a smile that doesn’t even reach his lips. It’s enough for her, though; she knows what he means without him having to say or do anything.

“She beat you,” Betty says, pushing herself up off the bed. She works her way slowly, step by careful step around Archie’s room, running her fingertips against the old Little League trophies and faded posters against the wall.

 _A life worked for these and loved these before_ , she thinks. _A life happened here in this very room._

_And now it’s gone. Just like that._

When her fingertips brush over the football sitting out on Archie’s dresser, she picks it up and tosses it between her hands. He’d stolen the football from some game, she remembers. A big one – Junior year Homecoming, maybe, or the first game he’d helmed as Senior Captain.

 _I can’t remember,_ Betty thinks frantically. _I’m already forgetting things._

_I’m already forgetting him._

“What did she beat me at?” Jughead asks, holding up his hand. Gently, she underhands the football over to him.

“It’s been twelve years since I last saw Veronica. Her twelve years topples your ten.”

“I’m surprised,” he says.

He tosses it back. Under her fingertips, the leather feels warm.

“Really? I’m not.” She’d been close with Veronica once, almost half her lifetime ago, but even back then, she’d never really thought Veronica would be one of those people she’d carry with her through her life. Riverdale was never home to Veronica the way to was to the rest of them, and they’d always been so different.

The drift, in her opinion, was inevitable.

“You were close,” Jughead says. “I thought - I don’t know. Archie and I were your best friends, but I know Veronica gave you something that we couldn’t.”

“Because she has breasts and long hair?”

He snorts, shaking his head gently as the football lands gracefully into his waiting hands. “I wouldn’t have put it that crudely, but in a way, yeah. I mean, there were things I talked to Archie about that I never shared with you.”

Maybe in another life she’d have found the greatest of offense at his words now. She remembers, she still remembers how much it’d mattered to her - a girl, keeping up with her two best boy friends. _Get dirtier than them,_ she’d tell herself, _survive Indian Burn for longer than they did, eat more than they do,_ a battle she always lost at.

But now her heart is simply with him and hurting for him. She knows how much he’d loved Archie. She knows how much she’s lost herself, and the thought of him feeling the way she does now, the thought of him losing maybe even more than she has shatters what remains of her heart.

 _“You’re my brother,”_ they’d so often said to each other in the past, and she’d hated it so much because it always relegated her to the outside.

But for a brother to lose a brother – there must be unimaginable pain in that.

When he tosses the football back to her, she returns it to its home on the dresser and sits back down next to him, feeling her legs tiredly give way under her.

“How did we get here?” she whispers. She doesn’t know who or what she’s asking for now, but she figures that any clarity is good. “And where do we go now?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Back to where we came from, I guess.”

“We came from here, Jug,” she reminds him gently. “We all did, before we disappeared to our corners of the world.”

He shrugs. “Then I’ll go somewhere else. Either way, I can’t come back here, Betty. I can’t be here. There’s nothing for me here anymore.”

_Not even you._

She nods in slow understanding.

There’s nothing left to say. She doesn’t know how to fix this for him. There’s a lot in this world she can fix – she’s been told that she has a knack for it – but she doesn’t know that she can fix everything he’s lost. Not even for him.

That’s the thing about loss, she thinks. It isn’t like something that’s broken, with the shattered remains falling into pieces around her – those she can still pick up and glue back together and pretend that the repair is as good as new. That she can still fix.

But loss is something that never returns. It never can.

She can’t fix this for him.

He’s a king without a crown now, a king without a kingdom.

He’s a king without knight, a king without his right-hand man.

There is no fixing that. There is no coming back from this.

There’s nothing left for her to do but this.

She leans in across the distance and as gently as she can, she brushes her lips over his. She’s about to pull back when she feels his hand at her shoulder holding her firmly in place.

She doesn’t know if it’s a kiss of comfort or a kiss with any love at all attached to it, but when she pulls back, tasting salt on her lips, what she does know is that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what he’d meant by that kiss, it doesn’t matter if she’d been tasting the remnants of his tears or hers, or some odd combination of both.

It simply doesn’t matter anymore.

Archie is dead.

Time has come and gone. Life has come and gone.

Life now is what it is.

This.

“Bye, Jug,” she whispers.

She leaves the room slowly, and he doesn’t stop her.

 

**_12:42 p.m._ **

Downstairs, she finds the kitchen empty so she slips out the back door, hikes up her skirt, and hops the fence between her house and Archie’s.

She’s had enough.

 

**_12:44 p.m._ **

There’s a heaviness to her bedroom that she doesn’t remember being there before. It’s thick, like a dense, murky fog she can’t shake or run away from, and so she resigns herself to a slow wade through the space she knows so well.

It’s unfamiliar because she’s never had to come face to face with it as the person that she is now, as just herself and without the promise of her two best friends on either side.

That her is gone forever – even if she ever wants to go back to find that girl of her youth, she never can anymore. She’s left with Archie; she’s with him now, buried with his body, buried with the beanie beneath the cold, damp ground.

Betty crosses the distance slowly, edging closer to the single corner of her room that had once brought her all the joy in the world. Her hand shakes as she reaches out to pull the curtain back from her window, but he’s still where she’d left him last, sitting on the edge of Archie’s bed with nothing at all in his eyes.

There’s a sharp, stinging shard of pain that pierces right to her very core when she sees him like this, the man who she’d once loved without the very life and vitality that she’d adored about him.

 _But still,_ she thinks.

_But still._

He’s still him. He’s still Jughead Jones. He’s a different version of him – he’s an older him, he’s a him that the world has molded and done things to, and he’s a him without Archie.

_But he’s still him._

She thinks then about the fleeting, tired comment he’d made during that near-sleepless night, the one she’d tried her best but still failed to understand.

Love is something that remains.

She thinks now that he might’ve been right. She doesn’t know that the part of her that loved him ever stopped. It’s complex and complicated the way she loves him – there’s history wrapped up in him; he’s the keeper of her childhood, her memories, her adolescence, her growth. He’s the holder of so much of her history. There’s so much in her life that he’s synonymous with, there’s so much in her life she associates him with even after all this time.

When she thinks of youth, she thinks of him.

When she thinks of feeling, she thinks of him.

When she thinks of safety, she thinks of him.

When she thinks of love, she thinks of him.

It’s still there, her love for him, muted and dormant throughout the years, but it’s still there holding steady and constant. It’s different than the way she’d loved him before; the romance of their story, the newness of it all doesn’t devour her mind, body, and soul like a flame and fire. It’s not all-consuming anymore. It’s a quiet kind of love, now; it’s one that she can breathe within. It’s a love that still loves him, but that loves every totem and memory he holds for her, too. In a way, it’s bigger – it encompasses so much more now. But it’s smaller now, too, in its lack of omnipresence over her life.

But it’s still love, she admits. It’s a different kind of love, but what remains is still love.

The problem, she realizes, is that it simply doesn’t matter anymore. Ten years without Archie or anything else holding them together is too much of a gap to bridge now.

She watches as Jughead pushes himself up from the bed, moving as slowly across the room as she had moved through her own. He pauses before the door, reaching with trepidation for the framed picture sitting on the dresser.

Betty holds her breath as he gently runs his fingertips over their shining, smiling faces. She doesn’t remember exactly when they’d taken that particular photo, maybe fifteen, maybe sixteen, but they’d been young. They’d still been so full of hope, still so full of life.

And never, she thinks, would those children in the picture have guessed that they’d be here, brought back together on a day like this.

She thinks she imagines it, but there’s a moment his hand stills over her face. It’s almost loving, the way he slowly grazes his thumb over her bright smile and the curve of her jaw; it’s tender, even.

Then, without preamble or warning, he returns the photo to the dresser, face-down, and pulls the door to Archie’s room open.

Betty tips her head back against the wall and lets the fabric fall from her fingertips. The curtain flutters against the glass pane, swinging over it with shards of vision and view, before settling down and covering the world on the other side.

She curls back into her bed and pulls the blankets up over her head.

She’ll never be able to look out her window again.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (The band of brothers quote is from Shakespeare's Henry V, Act IV, Scene iii, 18–67).


	6. Sunday, Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for this chapter - discussion of grief.

_Chain, keep us together._

**_12:00 a.m._ **

**Sunday – Day 125**

Distance.

He’d thought he’d known the concept of the word before, maybe even better than most.

He knows about the distance his mother put between her only son and herself, the distance that as much as she tried to convince him had nothing to do with him, he’d never believed. He looks too much like his father for that not to be true. He knows about the distance he’d suffered apart from his sister while they both traversed the unsteady, rocky terrain of their spectacularly dysfunctional family half a country away from each other; and he knows about the distance Betty had put between them at eighteen, back when both their eyes were wide and full of hope, so ready to defy everything the world had to throw their way.

Then, there’s the distance he hadn’t even known he’d been nursing until she’d walked into his apartment one rainy night and rattled his world wide awake – the distance he’d put between himself and life.

The distance he’d put between himself and living.

It’d all seemed so big before – the distance, the stupid, seemingly irreconcilable _distance_. But he’s always been one to make a mountain out of a molehill.

He knows he’d been wrong now. All those distances aren’t hopeless, and they aren’t the end of the line. They’re so small and so incredibly trivial to the one that the great beyond so harshly imposes.

Because there’s no distance, he knows now, that even comes close to the one imposed by death.

 

_**12:01 a.m.** _

He can’t sleep.

With his hands folded over his chest, he stares at the darkness mapping over his ceiling.

Technically, midnight is, at least by his standards, an early bedtime. He’s always worked best in the quiet hours of the morning; there’s something about the stillness that accompanies this time that allows him to push every trial and tribulation from the day away and just think.

But all that marvelous thinking seems to be his downfall now; he’s never been the type to sleep through his thoughts.

He sighs and flips over onto his side.

Then again, he thinks, that far-off thing called sleep might have something to do with this day, too.

It might have to do entirely with this day.

 

**_1:06 a.m._ **

In a way, he’s happier now.

He hadn’t known how disheartening being at the receiving end of an _‘are you up’_ text was until he’d told Cricket, as kindly as he could, that he’d really rather not receive those from her anymore. Or anyone else for that matter.

She hadn’t cared. And after he’d tended to his bruised ego, he’d found himself happier that he didn’t have the reminder of how far he’s come from what he wanted for himself. He’s always been the romantic type and he’s always believed in love.

He’s found himself believing in it a little more now.

And that’s nice.

And in another way, he’s absolutely miserable.

He doesn’t think there’s a day that’s gone by that he hasn’t thought about Archie, that he’s heard the final, chilling ring of his heartbeat moments before sleep, that he’s remembered all the promises he’s made and broken.

He sighs and flips his pillow over.

The cool side, Archie used to joke.

 

**_2:06 a.m._ **

Jughead sits up and flicks on the lamp on the bedside table.

He’s not sleeping tonight. And, he figures he might as well use his time well.

Shuffling over to his desk, he cracks his neck, first to the right, then the left. With unsteady hands, he reaches across his desk and draws the stack of yellowing, coffee-stained pages closer to him.

_What is he waiting for?_

He turns over the pages, breathing in deeply as he does.

The story of his past stares right back at him.

 

**_4:11 a.m._ **

_Riverdale,_ he reads.

_Riverdale, Riverdale._

He looks at the word scattered over the page, the combination of the nine letters that used to mean so much to him.

The letters that no matter how far he’s run from them, will always mean so much to him.

There’s heat that rises to his cheeks when he thinks about how long it had been since he thought about Riverdale before circumstance had forced him to find his way back home. He’d like to tell himself that he doesn’t know why he’d shunned it for so long, but he knows why he had.

It’s hard to go back or even think about a place that holds the roots of so many of his fractured dreams.   

But it’s still no excuse.

It’s where he was born, it’s where he’s from. It’s where he found his friends, the friends who’d become his family. It’s the place where he’d had his heart broken, but it’s also the place where he’d fallen in love.

Even after all this time, it’s still the place he calls home when he’s asked.

It’s still the place he thinks of as home.

 

**_4:25 a.m._ **

_Betty,_ he reads.

_Betty, Betty._

He’d forgotten just how big a role she’d played in these old pages of his life. The Juliet to his Romeo, the Daisy to his Gatsby, the great and unattainable one, the star-crossed lover he’d one day have to set free because he’d known – even then – that one day she’d shine too brightly for him to hold on to forever.

Jughead cringes as he reads over the words – Romeo and Juliet, fairytales and fortune, stars and stupid, overly grandiose dreams. They’re the words of the inexperienced and the naïve, of a child so blissfully blind to all the perils that the world has to offer, that the world would _inevitably_ offer.

But, he supposes, there’s a part of him that’s grateful for these twee, sentimental words he can’t quite believe he’d ever have the audacity to write. He’s always thought of himself as something of a victim to fate’s unfair and heavy hand, but he realizes that school of thought doesn’t quite hold water.

The him of his past was lucky, insurmountably so.

He’d dreamed and he’d wanted at sixteen. He’d had love in his youth – from his friends, from his family, from a woman who embodies all of that and so much more to him. And he’d loved back. He had the time and the life to dream and to love – to _be_ loved – and that’s such a privilege, he knows now. There are people out there so mired in unhappiness and pain that they can never see the light of a dream at the end of the tunnel, the possibility of something better. There are people who’ve never known what it means to be in love – and he knows now he truly had been with all his heart.

He flips through the faded pages, smiling at the loving words she’d once said to him, the words he’d once said to her. They’re beautiful words, he thinks as he runs his finger over the text, but they’re words filled with promises so much bigger than they should’ve made at that age.

_We’ll be okay, Betts. We always are._

_We’ve made it through so much worse than this. We’ll survive; we can survive anything._

_I’ll love you forever, Jug. I’ll never stop loving you._

Jughead sighs, pushing his foot against the wall as he tips his chair back. It’s a nice reminder that he’d loved so madly before, but it’s an even harsher reality check that he’s so far from the life that he’d had nearly half his lifetime ago.

He’s felt, but he knows he hasn’t felt as much or as completely as he’d felt back then.

He writes, but not what he really wants to.

He has a roof over his head, but it’s not a home.

He’s loved, but never in the way that he’d loved her.

 

**_4:39 a.m._ **

He juggles his foot against the wall, relishing in the delicate space between upright and tipping over.

He wonders what he’s waiting for.

 

**_4:40 a.m._ **

What is he waiting for?

What is he waiting for?

He’s old enough to know by now that he has as much a hand in his future and fortune as that murky thing known as fate does.

He’s been through enough to know what’s good about life and what isn’t. He’s experienced enough now to know what’s truly important.

What the hell is he waiting for?

It all lies with him, he’s realized for months now. There isn’t anything or anyone who will ultimately snap him out of his funk but himself.

If he wants to be the friend he knows that he can be, it’s up to him to start acting like it.

If he wants to keep his promises, if he wants to tell the stories he wants to tell instead of telling those that belong to others, then he has to endeavor to do it.

If he wants the love that he’s been dreaming of, then he has to go get it.

If he wants to go home, then he’ll have to take himself there.

There isn’t anyone out there who will write or dream or find love for him but him.

There isn’t anyone else out there who will live his life for him.

This is _his_ life to live.

 

**_4:42 a.m._ **

What is he waiting for?

 

**_4:43 a.m._ **

With a loud thud, he lands firmly back on the ground.

His feet fall squarely onto the floorboards. It’s cold to the touch, but he doesn’t let it stay that way for long.

He does, after all, have somewhere to be right now.

Somewhere he should’ve been on the road to a long time ago.

 

**_5:15 a.m._ **

There’s no crisis ahead of him this time, but he takes a cab to the nearest twenty-four hour car rental service he can find.

It _feels_ like there’s a crisis, though. There’s that same fire burning under his soles, the same erratic thump of his heart that together make him feel ready to walk out of his skin.

The lone attendant is sleeping when he gets there, and while he’s usually sympathetic to the art and gift of the nap, tonight he’s not.

_“Hey!”_

He slams his palm down on the countertop in case his voice doesn’t do the trick, but together, they do.

“I need a car,” he says.

It takes the attendant more than a minute to shake his grogginess, and Jughead has no patience for it.

“Okay,” the man mumbles slowly. “What kind of-”

“Any car will do,” he says. But because he doesn’t trust the man who he’d just woken from a deep slumber not to stuff him into a Lexus and overcharge him for it – “any _cheap_ car.”

Which, he realizes when he finds his car amongst the sea of black and grey sedans, is an eyesore of a lime green hatchback.

 

**_5:23 a.m._ **

He’s always liked driving. He likes the openness of the roads, the promise of all the places he could be if only he took the time to find his way there.

He likes the possibility that comes with driving.

And it’s always been a good time for him to think, too.

It’s something he’d do back in the day, hop on his bike or borrow the Andrews’ truck and just drive around Riverdale aimlessly, thinking. He’d think about love and he’d think about life. He’d think about writing. It’s where his best lines of dialogue and description came from, and some of his best unrealized ideas, too, from hours just driving circles around the roads he grew up on.

It’s nice to be behind the wheel again. He still likes it as much as he did back then.

He focuses on the road ahead and lets his mind wander.

 

**_5:31 a.m._ **

_Betty,_ he thinks.

_Betty, Betty._

Admittedly, he thinks about her a lot. Probably more than he should for someone buried so far in his past and who now leads a life separate and distinct from his own.

It’s hard for him not to think about her. He’s spent so much time over the last few months replaying Archie’s final days over and over again, and she’s so inextricably tied to those.

And when he tries not to think about Archie’s death, instead thinking of the days when his best friend had still been alive, he still thinks about her. She’s so tied to his past – he couldn’t untangle the strings of her presence if he tried.

He hates the last memories he has of her – the ones that have her incoherently mumbling into the black fabric of his suit jacket, wet notecards threaded through her fingers, the ones that had her walking out of Archie’s room without looking back as he said nothing. He knows it’s a part of life as much as death is – the bad memories, the ones he’d rather wish away – but that understanding doesn’t make the reality any easier to deal with.

So he tries to think about the better ones.

_The happiest memory he has of Betty._

He smiles when he remembers it. It’s still the first time he’d ever kissed her.

And he’d wanted to for years. It’d been a little different than he’d expected. He hadn’t expecting kissing someone to feel like that – a little sloppy and like he’d repeatedly run his tongue over his lips – but in a way, kissing her had been so much more than he’d thought it’d be, too.

Up until then, they’d had moments that allowed him to be close to her – hugs mostly. She’d always been a hugger. But when he’d kissed her that morning, he’d felt the whole of her pressed up against him, the pads of her fingertips gently grazing his cheek, still cold from the October air.

He’d felt her heartbeat under his thumb as he’d cradled the curve of her neck.

And when he’d looked at her after, the corners of her lips tugging upward in a content half-smile, that’s the happiest he thinks he remembers feeling in his youth.

_His favorite memory he has of Betty._

In the years that had come right after that kiss, his favorite memory of her is the first time she’d told him she loved him.

He’s always had a soft spot for romance, and it’s a moment he knew he’d love and treasure.

And he did. He still does.

 _“Jughead Jones, I love you,”_ she’d said to him, as sweetly as she’d ever said anything to him. It’s one of his very favorite memories, and if it were a tangible, real object he could hold in his hands, it’d be one of the first things he’d grab onto and run away with in the proverbial fire.

But in his heart, he knows that his very favorite memory of Betty really comes long before all that.

 

**_5:46 a.m._ **

He’d made sure that he’d held the matchbook over the trash.

He’d been sitting up with his mother the night before out on the front steps of the house they’d sell a handful of years later. She’d just wanted air she’d said, but he knew better – she was out there waiting for his father, just like she did every night. Most times in vain.

In a way, he admires his mother for leaving; no one, he thinks, should have to put up with something like that. It would’ve been nice if she thought about taking him along for the ride, too, but that’s ancient history now.

In the unmoving night, his mother had shooed him back into the house for the book of matches and her empty lighter to toss in the trash. When he’d asked if he could be the one to light the match, she’d turned to him instead of dismissing him immediately, cigarette perched between her second and middle finger.

“Why not?” she’d said eventually with an added shrug.

He’d fumbled gloriously, dropping the match in between his stubby fingers at first strike, and accidentally snapping it in half with his second. But with his mother’s hand guiding his and firmly dragging it across the rough surface the third time around, the small flame had sprung to life.  

She’d held his hand up to the end of her cigarette before blowing it out.

It’s the first time he remembers his mother treating him like more than a child, a sweet and monumental moment quickly followed by dollar bills thrown out on the kitchen table for him to fend for himself and take care of Jellybean.

Instead of putting them back in the kitchen drawer, he’d snuck the matches to school the next day in his back pocket, and at recess, showed the matchbook to Archie in his cupped palm.

“Want to light one?” he’d asked.

Archie had grabbed at the matchbook, turning it over in his hands as he examined it. “This is so cool,” he’d said. “Where’d you get these?”

“Home, moron.”

“You light one first.”

“Fine,” he’d relented, even though he’d really been hoping Archie would say that. So rarely did he ever beat Archie in anything – Archie who always got along with everyone better than he did, Archie whose birthday cupcakes always outshone his two packs of Chips Ahoy, always picked up from the supermarket the morning of.

It’d be nice to be the one to show him how to do this.

“Dude, you sure you know what you’re – oh shoot, hide those, here comes Betty.”

She’d been skipping. He remembers how she’d been skipping her way over to them, her pink dress riding up past her knees.

“Hey, what’re you – Juggie, we’re not supposed to have those!” she’d whispered over to him, eyes wide. “You’re going to get in trouble!”

“Who’s telling on me?” he’d dared her back. “You?”

It was unfair of him – it was so unfair of him and mean, too, because he knew how much keeping up with them meant to Betty.

She would never tell.

He could probably burn down the school, be standing knee-high in the middle of the wreckage and she’d still never tell on him. So many times he’d wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to try so hard to earn her place alongside them. She didn’t have to be so eager to please, she didn’t have to kill herself keeping up because she was already one of them – a musketeer, a member of the pack, their friend. It didn’t matter that she was a girl with a blonde ponytail who wore a dress, she was simply their friend, ponytail or not.

She was his best friend.

He’d lit the match with the same firmness his mother had taught him to do and smiled when the flame emerged without hesitation.

It’s an interesting thing, he thinks now, to remember how fascinated they’d been by that little lick of fire held between his fingertips.

“I’ve never lit one before,” Betty had whispered, her ponytail falling over her shoulder as she crouched low near the flame. In that moment, he’d almost grabbed the ends of it and yanked  it away from the fire, lest it send all that pretty blonde up in flames. “Can I try?” she’d asked, wide eyes flashing up to his.

Her breath had blown the flame back towards his fingers and without thinking, he’d dropped the match straight into the trash.

Betty had screamed when the trash erupted in flames, and with his hands on either of his shoulders, Archie had pulled him back.

 _Destruction of school property_ they’d accused him of. He’d been sitting outside the principal’s office then, but he could still hear everything being yelled at his mother behind the closed door.

_Bringing dangerous items into school, anti-social behavior._

_Attempting to burn down the Riverdale Elementary._

Really, he’d just wanted to look a little cool. He so rarely did.

She’d appeared out of nowhere, tiptoeing down the hall with an unwieldy bathroom pass hanging around her wrist.

“Hi, Juggie,” she’d whispered before reaching for the knob to the principal’s office.

“What are you doing?” he’d hissed at her. “You can’t go in there.”

“It was my fault,” she’d said plainly, chubby hand still curved around the knob. “You shouldn’t get in trouble for this.”

“Betty, just go away. They’re not going to believe you anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Because you never do anything bad.”

“That’s not true.”

“Betty, just stop.”

She’d looked so dejected when she’d climbed up onto the bench beside him, swinging her legs gently against the worn wood – she did that when she was nervous.

He smiles when he remembers that about her. She’d stopped when she’d grown tall enough that her feet reached the floor when she sat down, but it’s a nice thing to remember.

Betty Cooper used to swing her legs when she was nervous.

“I’m sorry, Juggie,” she’d said to him quietly. “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

He’d sighed, because as much as he wanted to blame her, he knew he should’ve never brought the matches into school in the first place. And he knew she’d never do anything, ever, to purposely get him in trouble.

“It’s okay.”

“I should tell,” she’d said. “It’s not fair that you’re getting in trouble for this.”

“It’s fine. Really. Just go back to homeroom.”

“Are we still friends?”

He remembers pausing then, and thinking back on it now, he wishes he could take those few seconds of hesitation back. “Yeah,” he’d said, “still friends.”

She’d swung her legs a few more times before whispering to him. “Do you want to know a secret?”

“I guess.”

“I thought it was kind of cool,” she’d said, almost shyly. “Not the part where the trash was on fire. But I think it’s cool that you can light matches.”

“Really?”

“Can you teach me sometime?”

“Sure,” he’d said, throwing in a shrug for good measure. “Anytime.”

With a tentative and slightly shaky hand, she’d reached across the bench and gently tugged his own off his lap.

He remembers that her palms were a little sweaty; but more than that, he remembers how firmly she’d held onto him.

That’s the first time he’d realized he loved her.

He hadn’t been in love with her back then since he’s always stood with his feet planted in the camp that one can’t really know what the avalanche of being in love entails at the ripe old age of ten. But that’s when he realized that he loved her. He’d loved the words she’d said to him, he’d loved her unfailing belief in him, her loyalty. He’d loved her friendship and how that had made him feel.

Like he was miles better than what everyone else made him out to be and expected him to be. Like he was worth something.

Jughead sighs, wishing that he’d had the strength and courage to at least say goodbye to her the last time he’d seen her.

He wonders how she’s doing now.

He hopes that wherever she is and whatever she’s doing, she’s okay.

 

**_7:01 a.m._ **

When he’s nearing halfway there, he turns off into some town he hasn’t heard of before and directs himself to the nearest CVS.

It’s a town that’s just beginning to wake up, with the odd woman here and there dotting the streets out for a run, and a handful of cars on the road heading off to whatever day they’re greeting. It looks like a nice enough town, but Jughead doesn’t pay too much attention to it.

He has somewhere to be.

At this hour, he’s the only one in the drugstore, but he doesn’t mind. Jughead has nothing against New York, but there’s always someone there next to him on the subway, in the store, brushing up against him in the elevator. It’s a full city, packed to the brim, but this is a nice reminder that there’s an entire world that exists outside of it.

Coffee in cans and bottles doesn’t normally do it for him – it’s usually far too sweet and there’s not nearly enough caffeine for his liking – but it’ll have to do today. At the fridge, he selects what looks like the least offensive option before making his way to the one-person checkout.

Before he reaches it, though, he pauses in front of a small selection of flowers. They’re incredibly sad looking, all crushed and wilting dangerously. But still, Jughead thinks – it’s the thought that really counts.

After idly flipping through the cellophane wrappings, Jughead settles on a half-flattened bouquet of white somethings. He has no idea which flowers are which other than the obvious roses, but as he’s halfway to shaking free the sad looking bouquet, he lets it fall from his hands and splash back down into the bucket.

 _It’s not the right sentiment,_ he thinks.

It doesn’t feel like what’s right.

Instead, he doubles back to the fridge and picks up what does.  

 

**_7:15 a.m._ **

When he’s back on the road, he thinks about the words that Fred Andrews had said to him months ago.

The words he still can’t stop thinking about.

_Love is something that remains._

He hadn’t been certain before, but he is now.

Fred Andrews, in all his wisdom and maturity, had been right.

Because he still does love her. Differently, but it’s still love.

He loves her the way he did when she’d held his hand outside the principal’s office, clammy and anxious, her green eyes wide with concern. And if he’s being honest, there are still echoes and pieces of the way he’d loved when he’d been in love with her wrapped up in the way he loves her now, too.

And yet, it’s different, too, this love his heart gives to her today. By definition he thinks that it has to be. Because the way he’d loved her at sixteen, at twenty never encompassed everything that had come after that – the years of wondering if he’d done the right thing, the wishful thinking that maybe in another life and another time, things might’ve been different.

That’s all part of the way he loves her now, too.

The way he loved her back then doesn’t have them surviving Archie’s death wrapped in it, nor does it have the memory of him stealing glances at her that day they laid Archie in the ground just so he could stay sane. It doesn’t have him wondering if Archie had been onto something – is this really his life working out differently, just as he’d always wished it would?

The way he’d loved her before doesn’t have him musing if ten years and a few hours’ drive in between them isn’t as big a distance to cross as he’d once thought it was.

He loves her still, he admits to himself, and it’s very likely that a part of him always will. She’s too much a part of his life, engrained too deeply in the very foundations of who he is for him to ever really fall out of love with her.

He smiles wryly to himself.

He supposes that deep down, he really still is a romantic at heart.

 

**_8:30 a.m._ **

When he sees his exit, he speeds up.

 _Welcome to Riverdale_ , he reads as he rolls past the sign that he knows so well. _The town with pep!_

Overhead, the sun continues its steady rise.

 

**_8:39 a.m._ **

Riverdale on Sunday mornings is slow. It’s always been that way.

They’re a town that likes to have pancake breakfasts around the table on Sunday mornings, maybe at home, maybe at Pop’s. They’re a town that fills the day with chores and football at home, with laundry and gardening, with homework if you’re Betty Cooper, or video games if you’re him and Archie.

In a way, Riverdale reminds him a little of the town he’d driven through earlier. Here, there’s the errant car moseying down the streets, an early bird power walking out on Elm, but there’s not much other than that going on.

But as much as that place had reminded him of Riverdale, it hadn’t been _his_ town. It didn’t have the memories that this place has – the pain, the happiness, the growth, and everything in between. It didn’t have his youth and bad decisions, and it didn’t have the lessons that came from those either.

There isn’t all that much tying him to this place anymore, but still – it’s nice to be home again.

 

**_8:46 a.m._ **

He feels his breath hitch as he turns into the cemetery’s open gates. His stomach twists and his hands instantly grow clammy.

Under his palms, the wheel slides.

 

**_8:51 a.m._ **

Jughead takes his time parking.

Then, he takes his time killing the ignition.

After that, he takes his time reaching over to the passenger seat and looping his hand into the CVS bag sitting there, too.

If he’s being completely honest, there’s a part of him that doesn’t want to be here right now. This may be the right place for him to be, and it may be the right thing for him to do, but it doesn’t make any of it easier.

Jughead holds his breath as he pushes the car door open and steps out in one quick motion. Death, he supposes, will never be an easy thing for him or anyone else in the world to confront, and the only way he really knows how to do it is by facing it head on. But even so, he gives himself a break by taking the long way there and coming up on Archie’s grave from behind. He’s only seen it once, but the image is enough to last a lifetime. He doesn’t need to see his best friend’s name etched in stone again when it’s already chiseled there so firmly in his mind’s eye.

Under his feet, the ground is firm.

Above him, the sun is steady and bright. Today, the world around him feels like it’s at some sort of equilibrium even if his own still feels a little off balance.

Not completely, but just a little.

He keeps his eyes down, focusing only on tracking his feet and nothing else. Despite how slowly he’s moving, the plastic bag in his hand rustling against his leg as he steps tentatively, he finally makes it.

Years and years too late, but he’s finally made it.

“Hey, man,” Jughead whispers, kneeling down on the ground. He leans against the uncarved granite, feeling the warmth from the stone spread across his back.

He’s finally made it when it doesn’t even matter anymore.

“Happy birthday.”

 

**_9:00 a.m._ **

“This is all so fucking stupid,” Jughead says eventually. He doesn’t know what else to say, so speaking from his heart is the best he can do. “It’s so stupid that I’m here and talking to you like this. You should be here.”

 _But he’s not,_ Jughead reminds himself. _And he will never be ever again._

So he’d better just get used to it.

“I uh, I brought you a beer,” Jughead says, reaching into the bag by his side. “I couldn’t swing a keg, but I figured this was just as good.”

With his forehead resting against the flesh of his palm because the reality of this is a little too much for him to contend with right now, he snaps one of the cans open and pours the liquid onto the grass next to him.

Then, he reaches for his own.

He isn’t much of a drinker, beer or otherwise, but cracking open a cold one with his best friend on his birthday just feels like the right thing to do.

More so than laying out a bouquet of drugstore flowers across the grass, anyhow.

“It’s warm,” he says, wincing at the sip that goes down none too easily. “Sorry about that. Although that probably doesn’t matter to you anymore. I wish it did, though,” Jughead whispers, tipping his head back against the warm stone. “I really wish it did.”

Jughead brings the can to his mouth again and tips back more than he really wants to drink. “It’s so weird,” he says quietly. “Having a one-sided conversation with you like this. I keep expecting you to say something because it still doesn’t feel like you’re really gone. Sometimes, I wonder what it’ll be like when that feeling finally sets in. I don’t really want to know, but I figure that I will one day.”

He inhales then, filling his lungs up completely before exhaling back out. “I guess if you were here, you’d ask about how I’ve been doing. I’ve been okay,” Jughead says, hesitating over his words; it still doesn’t feel right saying that yet, that he’s been doing better.

But he’s not going to lie when the truth is something that will make Archie grin that ridiculous grin of his.

“Actually, I’ve been writing again. It’s nothing much so far, just a bunch of short stories, but that’s still something, right? I think it is. You’d probably say that it is, too, and then say something annoyingly encouraging.” Then, in the lowest of whispers because even in an empty cemetery, this is still only for Archie to know – “I think I’m going to start working on that book again. I’ll probably have to rewrite most of it because it’s – man, it’s so bad. Embarrassing levels of bad. But I think there’s a story there.”

 _At the very least_ , _woven in those old pages is Archie’s story, and that’s one worth telling._

“And I guess if you were here, you’d ask me about Betty, too,” Jughead admits. “I’ve uh, I’ve been thinking about her a lot. I’ve been thinking about what you said about her that day… you know, the day that you… the day you died.” It’s no secret at this point, but he whispers the last word just the same. “You always told me to do something about Betty and I always said that there was nothing left between us anymore to do anything about. You know, you thought I was the smart one, but I’m not when it comes to her. Or maybe you just know me better than I thought you did. Knew,” he corrects himself quietly. “Knew.”

Jughead sips from the can again, ignoring the unpleasant, sour taste. Right now, he feels like he needs the liquid courage.

“But you know what? You were right,” he tells Archie. “You were right when you said that I still care about her, because I do. And you were right when you said that I still love her, because I don’t think I ever stopped. Honestly, I don’t know that I ever will – she’s just... she’s my history, just like you are. She’s in every good memory we had growing up here. She’s just... she’s Betty, you know? She’s so much of who we were.”

He can almost hear Archie, clear and so simple in his honesty whispering over to him from worlds away.

_She could still be a part of who you are, you know._

Archie Andrews – he’d always been their champion.

“Did you know she kissed me?” Jughead says, unable to mask the incredulity in his voice. “After your funeral, in your room. We were talking about you, actually, and she kissed me. And I kissed her, too. I didn’t do anything about it – I didn’t know if she wanted me to. And it just wasn’t the right time. I wasn’t thinking about things like that on the day of your funeral. But I’ve been thinking about it a little more recently. You know, friendship. Love. Her.”

He tips his head to the sky then, staring at the sun until his vision becomes nothing more than a blurry, blinding light. “Anyhow,” Jughead says. “I’ve been thinking about calling her to see how she’s doing. One day. Or, you know, going to visit her or something if that’s okay with her. I used to think that there was too much broken between us to ever fix it, but she’s still here and so am I. And I think one day, I’d like to do something about that.”

There’s an excitement he doesn’t expect that comes from admitting that out loud to Archie, a bubbling, heart-clenching kind of feeling that comes from the unknown and the uncharted, the infinite possibility of something new just around the corner.

“I’ll let you know how it goes,” Jughead says.

 

**_9:16 a.m._ **

When he finishes off the last of his beer, Jughead feels his heart clench. It’s an arbitrary marker, but it’s still a harsh, pointed reminder nonetheless that at some point, he’ll need to say goodbye and leave.

“I should get going,” Jughead says, gathering up the empty cans. He can’t bring himself to stand yet. There’s too much finality to that. “Traffic back to the city’s probably going to be shit today. But, uh, I hope you have a good birthday, wherever you are.”

Jughead sighs, tipping his head back against the gravestone. “You know, we expect others to die,” he begins quietly. “We all know we’re going to have to deal with that at some point – our grandparents. Our parents. And we prepare for it as much as one can prepare for something like that. But I never thought I’d have to deal with this – you dying, I mean. Yeah, maybe when we were ninety, sure. But not now.”

He doesn’t realize he’s running his hand restlessly through his hair until he forces it back down to his side. It’s a habit that’s gotten steadily worse over the past few months since he’s been without his beanie.

But he’s working on it.

“Do you remember when your grandmother died?” Jughead continues. “Your parents let me sleep over for three days in a row. Betty was so pissed that she wasn’t allowed to. There was that one night, I think right before the funeral, that you told me you were scared of dying; and I told you I was, too.” He inhales deeply, working up to the confession he’s had a hard time coming to terms with, even within the confines of his own mind. “I’m not anymore,” he whispers, turning his head over his shoulder. “I’m not saying that I want to die anytime soon because I don’t. There’s still stuff I want to do. There’s so much. But I’m not scared anymore. It’s not as scary when you think of someone that’s been through it before – you’ve gone through it, and I can, too. You know, that always used to be my metric – if Archie can do it, so can I. I don’t know what’s beyond death. You know me – I don’t think there’s much. But I also don’t know, truly. How could I? And sometimes I think that when that moment comes, if I’m present enough to remember that you’ve gone through this, too, that you just might be there in that iota of a nanosecond after death, I know I’ll be fine.”

Jughead closes his eyes. The breath from his words bounces back against him as he speaks softly to the speckled stone. “More than fine, even,” he says. “It’d be nice to see you again.”

Then, in one quick motion, he pushes himself up off the ground and rises to his feet.

 

**_9:25 a.m._ **

He thinks he should say something pretty or profound now because he doesn’t know when he’ll next get the chance to. But for all the tales he can spin, and for all the words he can weave, he’s got nothing now. He’s said all that he’s wanted to.

With his head hung low in a gesture that he hopes conveys every emotion he isn’t eloquent enough to express right now, he reaches out a hand to Archie in a silent goodbye.

But leaning just slightly over the headstone – the one that reads Archie Andrews, beloved son and friend, the six words he doesn’t think truly do justice to who Archie really was – he sees it, out of the corner of his eye.

Daisies.

The chain is small, just as small and delicate as the ones she’d made to fit their thin wrists those twenty years ago, and if he hadn’t been paying attention, he’d have missed it entirely. It blends so seamlessly into the grass, like it’d always been there.

Like it belongs there.

He wonders what it means.

He wonders if she’s here.

But as he steps slowly around the grave and gently picks up the ring of woven flowers, he realizes that he already knows.

What is he waiting for?

 _One day,_ he’d said. One day, maybe he’d call her. One day, maybe he’d drive out there to see her.

_One day, one day._

He remembers how happy it’d made Archie when he’d seen them both together again, the way he’d smiled just like he’d done when they were kids huddled away in his treehouse or camped out in the Andrews’ basement on a Friday night with a pizza in between them.

He remembers how happy it’d made him, too, being around her again. Frustrated, yes, and angry and overwhelmed and every other emotion under the sun, as well. But even through all that, being around her again had just made him happy.

What is he waiting for?

“Bye, Archie,” he says, laying the daisy chain back against the warm granite.

As he turns away, he feels the sun falling equally on both his shoulders.

 

**_9:28 a.m._ **

He decides to walk even though it’s by no means a short one.

It’s been years since he walked through this town, but he’s unsurprised that his feet, his body, his mind still know exactly where to go.

Not one day, he’s decided.

_Today._

 

**_9:59 a.m._ **

At the clearing, Jughead pauses and allows himself a moment to memorize the scene in front of him.

But he doesn’t need to – it’s all still exactly as he remembers it.

There’s gentle babble of the river as it welcomes him back, the low bow and sway of the leaves as they bray over the water, and the soft rustle of a biting breeze running over his skin.

And her.

She’s older, and now that he’s really looking closely, he realizes that her blonde is a shade darker than it’d been back then. Her legs, the ones that would never come close to reaching the riverbank at age ten, now hover near the edge of the water, and her fingers, working deftly at chaining yet another strand of daisies together are no longer stout. Now, they’re elegant and graceful.

But it’s still her – his youth and happiness, his agony and pain. His past, but maybe if he’s lucky enough, a part of his future, too. His love.

His best friend.

 

**_10:00 a.m._ **

“I’ll take it without looking the gift horse in the mouth this time,” he calls over to her, nodding at the daisies in her hand.

At his voice, she turns quickly and his eyes catch hers before he’s even finished his sentence. But she doesn’t look surprised to see him, he thinks even as she squints up at him in an attempt to filter out the sun. Relieved, and maybe even happy – but not surprised.

“Hi,” she says, tilting her head to the dry, coarse grass on her right.

He takes his place next to her, matching her pose by loosely wrapping his arms around his knees.

“Hi.”

 

**_10:01 a.m._ **

They don’t speak for a while, but it isn’t an uncomfortable silence they share.

He’d go so far as to say that it’s nice, even. It’s just him and her and the soft sounds of the water lapping against the shore, and he’s always found comfort in the mundane nature of that.

Sitting next to her now, he realizes that he isn’t angry with her anymore the way he’d been that night she’d flung a remote at his wall. He thinks that maybe the elephant of their past will never be something they’ll completely shed, but it isn’t weighing him down today. In fact, it hasn’t in a while. That anger he’d shouldered for years has dissipated, and that alone makes him feel light. And today, he isn’t overcome with his grief like he’d been the day of Archie’s funeral. He’s sad, and he thinks that he likely always will be where Archie’s concerned, but that sadness doesn’t stab at him and threaten to break him now.

There are weights on him – the burdens of his past and the mistakes of his history – but there’s a glimmer of something else on the horizon, too. Something bright and something light – a handful of hope he wants nothing more than to reach out and cup within his palms, to nurse and bring to life.

“You know,” she says eventually, a hint of teasing underpinning her voice, “you kind of smell like a brewery.”

He doesn’t know what he expected her to say, but it hadn’t been that. “I was with Archie,” he explains. “I, uh, I brought beers. I mean, just one beer – one for him, one for me. I figured he’d want one today.”

“You didn’t drive here, did you?”

Jughead smiles over at her – she’d always been the mom over them. “I left my rental over there.”

“Is it yellow?” Betty jokes.

He meets her careful humor with a huffed laugh. “Green. Lime green. It’s possibly worse than yellow.”

There’s a beat before she speaks again, and her voice, when it comes, is quiet like the wind around them. “I thought you might be here today,” she says.

“I wasn’t sure I was going to come.”

“But it was the right thing to do.”

“It was.” Then, matching her quietness – “You said one of the things you still like about me is that I tried to do the right thing by Archie before – you know. I promised him I’d be there for his birthday. I just – I couldn’t break that.” With her head turned towards him, she rests her chin on her upper arm as she listens carefully. “I wish he was still here,” Jughead says. “I wish being here today meant something to someone other than me.”

“I feel like I can see us,” she whispers, tilting head towards the direction of the banks below. “I don’t even need to close my eyes to remember it. I can still see us running up and down here, so clearly. All three of us.”

“Betty-”

“I think about him every day,” she continues, a tremor in her voice. “And I miss him every day.”

There’s a part of him that wants to veer her off course – he hates seeing her as upset as she is now and he knows that if he goes for the sardonic and dry route, it’ll likely take her mind off of whatever she’s thinking about, even if only for a moment.

But he also knows that he might be one of the only people in the world who can even come close to understanding what this might feel like for her; and a bigger part of him wants to simply be there for her in whatever way she needs him to be.

“I do, too,” he says eventually.

Simple understanding, he’s come to realize, goes an incredibly long way.

Betty smiles over at him, just barely. “I think about you, too. Every day.”

A ring of heat immediately circles around his neck. “Yeah? What do you think about?”

“Everything,” she says. “Nothing. I don’t know.”

“You have to be thinking about something,” Jughead presses gently.

“I think about that night at the hospital, the night that Archie died. You said that I could’ve stayed with you. Sometimes, I think I should’ve said yes. I wanted to.”

“Did you?” he asks quietly.

She turns to him, eyes fixed on his, and it’s all the answer he needs.

“I also would’ve avoided a two hundred dollar minibar fee.”

“Jesus, Betty.”

“Oh, don’t judge. Half of it was snacks. The trail mix – that’s where they get you.”

He doesn’t know if it’s what she wants him to do, or even what she’s expecting from him, but he laughs. There’s really nothing funny about her eating overpriced, stale hotel trail mix in a drunken, hiccuping ball on the floor; especially since that image had been born out of the worst night of his life, and probably hers, too. There’s a morbidness to it all – he’s sitting here right now, he’s back home today solely because of that night.

But he laughs because despite every horrible thing that’s happened, he feels alive right now. Right here, right now, next to her – he feels so alive.

And that in and of itself feels incredible.

Then, over the rhythm of the river, pushing and pulling at their feet, she laughs with him, too.

 

**_10:04 a.m._ **

He lets the echo of their laughter linger until he’s sure he can’t hear it anymore.

“How’ve you been?” he asks.

Her responding nod is measured, but it’s a nod just the same. “Okay,” she says slowly. “Better.”

“That’s good, Betty,” he says. “That’s really good. You look… better.”

What he really means to say is that he thinks she looks beautiful today. She’d been beautiful the last time he’d seen her at Archie’s funeral, too, but that had been a different kind of beautiful; the way she loves and the way she cares about the people she loves – the extent of her unyielding compassion – those are some of the most beautiful things about her. That day, with her love and unmatched, naked sorrow for Archie written so plainly across her face, she’d been beautiful, without a doubt.

But today she’s a different kind of beautiful. She’s still hurting, he can tell.

But she’s healing, too.

Her shoulders aren’t as tense and drawn together now, and there’s the hint of a smile playing mischievously across her lips. None of that had been there the last time he’d seen her. And her eyes, too, wide and expressive as always, are brighter now and devoid of the sheen of tears that had been bubbling there that horrible day. There’s some life dancing there today, a glint and a gleam – a spark that reminds him of everything he loves about her.

She’s healing; she’s getting there.

And all of that is inordinately beautiful on her.

“Thanks,” Betty says. Then, in a soft but sure voice – “you look better, too.”

He _feels_ better. But it still means the world coming from her. “I’ve been writing,” he tells her.

Her eyes are bright again when they swing to his, full of excitement and something that he thinks looks a lot like the pride he used to see on her. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Just a few short stories. I’ve been thinking about sending them to a magazine or something. Haven’t decided yet.”

“Send it to me.”

His heart thumps so loudly that he’s sure she can hear it, too. “What?”

“The magazine, when they get published. Send me a copy.”

Over the years, he’s forgotten what the strength of her faith in him felt like. It’d been one of his favorite things about her, the unwavering support she never failed to bestow on him, and now, he remembers why. He doesn’t know that he’s felt this invincible in years, like the world might once again be at his fingertips, that it’s there and tangible for him to grasp onto and make something of.

It’s a quick thought and it comes on suddenly, but he doesn’t want to be without it in the future – this feeling. Her belief in him.

“You’re confident,” Jughead notes as casually as he can.

“In you, I always will be.”

He doesn’t know that he’s ever heard her speak with more honesty before and there’s a fleeting moment, one he holds himself back from, that has him wanting nothing more than to reach across and hug her. “You always did see the good in people,” he says instead. “That’s what’s good about you.”

“That was more Archie than it was me,” she says, voice soft. “But I’m working on it. I’ve been coming home on weekends.”

“Yeah? To Riverdale?”

She nods. “I blamed my parents for more than I should. Especially my mother,” she reveals quietly. “I project on them more than I should, and that isn’t fair. I wanted to make it right with them while I still could. I wanted us all to be better.” Betty sighs, hugging her knees tightly up to her chest as she does – what comes next is difficult for her to admit, he can tell.

“Jug, I don’t know my parents for the people they are,” she begins quietly. “And I should. I _want_ to know. I’ve only ever thought of them as that my entire life – my parents. They’re my mom and dad. But they have stories and hopes and dreams and regrets that I know nothing about. I just – I want the chance to know them as they are. They’ve always seen the good in me. I want to see the good in them.”

“Betty, that’s-” he trails off, catching the remainder of his sentence before it tumbles out of his mouth.

 _What I’ve always wanted for you,_ he’d been about to say. And it is. His own shells of relationships with his parents may be beyond repair, but he’d never wanted that fate to fall on her, too. He might not fully understand the Coopers, but at the end of the day, he can’t point to a single instance that betrayed anything but the fact that they saw only good in Betty and that they wanted the very best for her.

And that, he’s always been able to get behind.

“I’m happy for you, Betty,” he says. “I don’t know that you’ve ever wanted that before.”

“I think maybe there’s a part of me that did,” she admits. “I just – needed the right motivation.”

“Archie?” he guesses.

“Archie,” she agrees softly. “And... I’ve been seeing someone, too.”

“Oh,” Jughead responds slowly, unsure of what else to say. He does his best to hide his complete disappointment but he can hear how hard he fails at it.

At his tone, Betty’s eyes flick wide in confusion for a moment before she smiles back at him. “She also has a fainting couch and a Ph.D. in psychology,” she says. Then shyly – “but good to know where you’re at.”

He’s never been all that good at hiding his emotions when it comes to her, and he’s sure that the wide grin he feels breaking across his face now is indicative of how much that hasn’t changed. “I’m glad,” he says. And he is, in so many ways. “I’ve been seeing someone, too. Also with a Ph.D. in psychology. No fainting couch though.”

“See, that was the deal breaker for me,” she jokes. “Has it helped at all?”

He takes a moment to consider her question. “Yes,” he answers eventually. “It’s hard not to feel guilty about what happened to Archie. It’s hard not to get up every day and think about how unfair it all is. But I don’t know – this helps a little. It helps to just… talk.”

“Do you think we were good enough friends to him?” Betty asks softly. “I don’t feel like I was.”

He pauses at her question, the very same one he’s asked himself over and over again.

“Archie deserved the type of friend he was to us,” he concludes slowly. “And I know I wasn’t as good a friend as he was to me. But he seemed to think that we were enough – maybe that’s all that matters.”

She sighs, her shoulders rocking with the movement. “I hope so.”

“You were a good friend,” he tells her. “You may not know that, but Archie did. And I do. You’ve always been a good friend, Betty – to Archie, to me. Much better than I ever deserved.”

Her cheeks are pink when she looks over to him – she’s never been particularly good at taking a compliment and he can tell that still hasn’t changed. She’s always blushed through her bashfulness before downplaying however well-deserved the praise might be.

“I’m glad it’s helping you, Jug,” she says eventually. “The person you’re seeing.”

“Do you want to know something?” he asks.

“Sure.”

He sways over and bumps her shoulder with his. “This helps the most.”

 

**_10:15 a.m._ **

“Do _you_ want to know something?” she asks.

He turns to her, balancing his chin on his upper arm. “Always.”

“When I was driving that night, I made myself think about all the memories I had of Archie to distract myself.”

“I know,” he tells her gently. “You said so at Archie’s funeral.”

“Oh,” Betty says quietly, frowning. “I can’t remember most of that day.”

He can’t help it, but he finds himself wondering if she remembers that she kissed him.

He hopes that she does.

“I didn’t want to think about Archie when I was driving back to Providence,” she tells him. “So I thought about you. I made myself think about all the memories I had of you.”

He doesn’t even think he’s surprised that he’d been doing the same thing earlier. They’d always been on the same wavelength about so much. He wonders, though, what she’d been thinking about.

He wonders what she remembers.

“Oldest memory?”

There’s surprise that crosses her face at his question, but it’s quickly replaced by an amused smile tugging at the corners of her lips.

“It was one of my birthdays,” she begins. “Maybe my fourth or fifth. You ate my cake before I did, and I was, um… upset about that.

He remembers this one, too, largely because he’d gotten in trouble for embarrassing his mother and the Jones family at large when they’d gotten home later that day.

Still, he thinks, that Betty had gotten _‘upset’_ is a very kind way of framing it.

“Do you remember what happened after?” he asks her, amused.

“I already said I was sorry about that,” she prefaces, laughing. “Many times.”

“So you remember whipping your cake at me before sitting down in the middle of your backyard and declaring I’d ruined your entire birthday party?”

 _"Yes_ , Jughead,” she says pointedly. “It’s not something one forgets easily.”

“In my defense,” he tells her. “I thought you’d already had a bite.”

“Sure you did,” she jokes.

“Favorite memory?”

There’s a smile playing on her lips before she answers. “Remember that day I got into Northwestern?”

“Mmm hmm.”

“I showed you the email, around lunch I think, and you were just – you were so, so happy for me, Jug.”

“I was,” he says simply. “No one works harder than you do. And no one deserved to get what they wanted more than you.”

“We didn’t do much that night – watched a movie. Made hot chocolate, had sex,” she says, slightly teasingly. Almost encouragingly, even. “But I’ll never forget that day. You were so happy for me. You were so proud of me even if that day was technically the beginning of the end.”

“Hey,” he says, and firmly too because this is important. “We may not have worked out then but I never stopped being proud of you, Betty. I still am. Know that.”

She turns her gaze to him in careful consideration. He doesn’t know what she’s searching for, but he hopes she finds his honesty there, his unmasked truthfulness. He’s always been proud of her, and amidst all the anger and pain and frustration, that’s always held constant.

He can’t say for certain because the rest of his life is hopefully, still a long road to walk down, but just as he thinks he’ll always love her, no matter where they are, he’ll likewise always be proud of her, too.

“I do,” Betty says eventually. “I know.”

 

**_10:21 a.m._ **

“My turn,” she says.

He nods back at her. “Have at it.”

“Your favorite memory of us together.”

He wonders if her very specific time frame means anything at all.

“We were at my dad’s trailer,” Jughead says simply. “You told me you loved me.”

“Mmm,” she hums, smiling. “That’s one of my favorites, too.”

“The first time you told me you loved me?”

“The first time you told me you loved me,” Betty clarifies. “I knew I loved you. And deep down, I knew that you loved me, too. But hearing the words… there’s just something about it that makes it different. It was special, Jug. It was one of the best moments of my life.”

There’s a pride that comes when he hears her words. He’s sure she’s had a lot of wonderful moments in her life, and with a lot of wonderful people in many wonderful places, too. He’s always known he’d loved – _loves_ – a good woman, and that the moment he’d stood in front of her, soul exposed with nothing but love for her means as much to her it does, simply makes him proud.

“It was one of the best moments of my life, too,” he tells her.

She grins at him widely and he thinks again about how beautiful she looks when she’s happy.

 

**_10:23 a.m._ **

“Saddest memory?” she asks.

“Betty, we don’t have to-”

“Jug, I want to know,” she says. “Please.”

“I was visiting you at school,” he begins. He doesn’t like thinking about this memory, even now. “It was just a weekend thing – you had class on Monday. And I did, too, but I came to see you anyway. I remember that I drove for hours – the entire day. But when I got there... I don’t know that you were even that happy to see me.”

“Jug, of course I was,” she tells him. “I _was_.”

He believes her because she’s never been disingenuous and she’s never been untruthful. But the memory still remains. “You were getting ready when I got there, remember?” he continues. “You looked so pretty, Betty, you always do. And you were so excited. I couldn’t tell you not go to the party and stay in your room and watch movies with me instead. So I went with you.”

“I remember,” she whispers, and when she does, he wishes he could stop telling his story then and there.

“I spent most of that night sitting in the corner just watching you,” he tells her. “And that was fine. This isn’t my saddest memory of you because of that. I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t have surprised you the way I did when I just showed up at your door. But when I looked at you, I just – I felt like I didn’t fit into your life anymore. I’d never felt that before, but I did then – that you’d outgrown me. All I could think about were puzzle pieces. We’d fit once but we just didn’t anymore. No matter how many ways you turned it and tried to shove those two pieces together, we just didn’t fit.”

He breathes in deeply, watching her in his peripheries. She’s carefully guarding her expressions, he thinks because she knows he’s always been able to read them well, but still – he can tell this isn’t the easiest thing for her to hear.

‘I knew at that moment that there wasn’t any way to fix us. There wasn’t any way to make us fit no matter how hard we tried to piece ourselves together. And I didn’t want to either – I wanted you to live your life the way you wanted to. I wanted you to _be_ whoever you wanted to be. But knowing that I’d have to walk away from you? That at some point you wouldn’t be in my life anymore as much as I love you – that’s the saddest memory I have of you, Betty.”

She’s still perfectly composed when he looks over to her, eyes fixed on the river, shoulders held firm. He wonders if he’s revealed too much, or if he’s said something he shouldn’t have.

“Sometimes I wonder if there’s anything we could’ve done differently,” she says eventually. “If there’s a single moment somewhere in time we could change, would it change everything? Would we still be together? Would Archie still be alive?”

“Betty, you can’t-”

“If there was one single moment somewhere hidden in the history of us that we could’ve done differently – maybe if I never went to that school, or maybe if we never went to that party – maybe we’d still be together. Maybe instead of being out in the rain that night, Archie would’ve been over at our house, having pizza with us instead. And maybe he’d still be alive.”

Jughead inhales deeply, training his gaze to the water she’s so captivated by. He thinks he knows the answer – that there are a million and one moments that could’ve led to their lives going down paths so wildly different than the ones they’re on now. And that in some alternate universe, a universe where it didn’t rain that night that Archie had stepped off the sidewalk a second too late, a universe where Betty had gone to a different school, or he had – he supposes their lives would be different.

Maybe they’d be married. Maybe they’d have a couple of kids, too. Maybe they’d have pizza with Archie on Thursday nights, safe and warm, and sheltered from the rain in the comfort of their home.

And maybe Archie would still be with them.

But in this universe and in this world, all he knows is that they’ve made their choices long ago. He could spend the rest of his days analyzing the life he’s already put behind him, looking for the moment that they could’ve changed it all.

But there’s no point in that. However much he wants or doesn’t want to go back and rewrite the past, to do it better than he’d done it the first time around, he can’t. All he has now is the life that still stretches out in front of him, and Betty, still so real and so full of life, sitting there next to him.

But what an awesome, marvelous gift that all is.

“Betty, I don’t know that there’s a reason in death, and if there is, I don’t know that I want to know it,” Jughead starts slowly. “And I don’t know if there’s some kind of great reason behind Archie’s death; I’m not going to try to look for it.”

“But?”

“But,” Jughead continues, feeling a pull at the corner of his mouth. She still knows him so well. “I don’t know that you and I would be here right now if it wasn’t for Archie. Betty, I’m not happy that he died. I’ll be miserable about it for the rest of my life. But I am happy that it’s brought me back to you, even if it is only for today.”

He hopes it isn’t, but that isn’t completely up to him to decide.

 _Today_ , he thinks.

_Today, today._

It doesn’t seem like enough now.

He knows it isn’t.

“Jug?” she calls over to him.

He loves the way she says his name.

“Hmm?”

“I don’t want it to be ten years before I see you again.”

His heart stills for a moment before kicking into overtime. When he looks to her – _slowly_ , he tells himself, _move slowly so that you don’t break this moment_ – he finds that she’s already looking back at him.

 _Tomorrow_ , he thinks then.

He holds his arm out to her – his brand of open honesty to match hers – and when she slides into the space he invites her into, he tucks her ponytail under his chin.

“I don’t either,” he says.

He hadn’t known just how comforting it’d feel to have her up against his side like this again, but it is. His world isn’t completely right yet, but feeling the weight of her leaning on him reminds him that there’s still a chance for everything else to slide back into place.

_Tomorrow, tomorrow._

“I miss you,” he tells her quietly, turning to the soft edge of her hairline and pressing his lips gently against it. He can’t manage much more than that for now, nor does he think he should push for it, but that’s okay with him.

Why rush when they have the time and the life not to?

“I’ve been missing you, Betts,” he tells her. “And I don’t want to keep missing you.”

“I miss you, too,” she whispers, turning the cold point of her nose against his neck.

And even though her voice floats with the wind as she speaks, so light and delicately soft, it catches and lands surely on him.

 

**_10:50 a.m._ **

When she has two neatly braided daisy chains at her feet, she hands one to him. Right away, he can tell that it’s small for his wrist and he remembers all too well how fragile the bracelets can be – his clumsy hands have broken both hers and his before. Instead, he wordlessly loops two fingers through the chain and squeezes her shoulder in silent gratitude.

He’d meant what he said – he’s never hesitating in the face of her friendship or love again.

From the corner of his eye, he can see the knife edge of a smile on her lips before it fades as she looks down to the second ring cradled in her hands. “Go on,” Jughead encourages gently.

Against him, he feels the stutter of her heavy inhale. “Happy birthday, Arch,” Betty whispers as she tosses the chain towards the river. “We miss you – more than you’ll ever know.”

He watches as the flowers spin and sway with the current, rising, falling, then rising again with the downstream pull. He feels her breath hitch beside him as the tide unravels her handiwork, rushing between the delicate petals and stems, tugging them apart as they flow.

It isn’t the time for talk right now – they’ll have time for that later. Maybe at Pop’s – he hasn’t had a milkshake in a while and he could use one. Maybe over the phone as they figure out how life works now. Maybe in New York, maybe during weekends in Riverdale, maybe in Providence – he’s never been there before and he’d like to see more of the world; there’s a lot of it to see, and he has the life with which to see it.

Or, maybe they’ll talk somewhere else entirely. But that will come later.

Now, he draws the hand he has resting on the curve of her shoulder down to the one she has on her thigh, and for a moment he thinks he might not reach her.

But when she turns her hand towards his, palm facing up, and ready to meet him halfway, he does.

In the distance downstream, the flowers tug and separate with the current before spinning off to the far corners of the river and the spaces under the waves.

But maybe that’s the way that it should be. They’re beautiful, the way she’d woven and circled the daisies together. But beauty like that shouldn’t be chained and held together. It’s a little like Archie, he thinks, and the way he’d touched all their lives. It’s like the way he’d made their lives bright and beautiful, the way he’d made them better people even as far as they’d gone from where they started.

The bonds of friendship and the bonds of love – they’re stronger than any stream or storm. They’re more than the promises made in childish wonder and innocence, and they’re bigger than the symbols they’d once used to seal those grandly spoken vows.

Friendship and love are quiet strengths that can weather through time and space, he knows now.

They can survive even the distance of death itself.

As the final flower tucks around the river’s bend, there’s a breeze that dances towards them, one that rustles his hair off his forehead, one that sweeps the tip of her ponytail gently against the nape of his neck. It smells crisp, the air, clean and fresh, with just a hint of the daisies surrounding them spun into it.

It smells wholly new.

She squeezes his hand then, unprompted and without hesitation, firmly and surely.

When she does, he looks down at their fingers and at the pattern he finds woven there – hers, his. Hers, his; the links in the chain he’d thought they’d broken long ago still holding steady, still holding strong.

He grips her hand in return.

He smiles at the strength that still remains.

**_10:52 a.m._ **

**_Sunday._ **  

**_Day 1._ **

 

 

 

**_Fin._ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To the always fabulous, always helpful, and brilliant bugggghead - thank you so much for all your hard work in betaing this. I can say without a doubt that each of the 155 pages that comprise this story have been made better by her wonderful thoughts and insight. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!
> 
> To you, the wonderful readers - thank you for coming along on this journey. Death, as ubiquitous as it is, never is an easy thing to confront and contend with. It’s the hardest thing in the world. But out of death, at least sometimes, can come something beautiful - a new lease on life, new perspectives, healing. Hope. And I think, whoever you are and wherever you are, the presence of hope is always a nice thing to be reminded of.
> 
> If you haven’t and would like to - come find me on @heavy-lies-the-crown on Tumblr! One final, very heartfelt thank you for your support, wonderful comments, and insight for this story. I truly appreciate it.


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